From hard lessons to AI-ready analytics: Fanatics’ journey with dbt and Snowflake
Fanatics Betting and Gaming fixed metric chaos with dbt, then layered Cortex Code and Snowflake agents on top.
Overview
Fanatics Betting & Gaming's journey building a modern data platform, from early warehouse/permissions/setup obstacles to current best practices integrating dbt with Snowflake Cortex and AI-powered analytics for governed business insights.
What you'll take away
- 01
Three teams asked for the same metric, Gross Gaming Revenue, and got three different numbers; a medallion architecture and a dbt Mesh-style setup gave the company exactly one governed definition.
- 02
Cortex Code, run with full project context, remodeled a 28-model, $300-a-day setup into 4 medallion-style models costing about $60 a day, with humans still validating every change.
- 03
None of the natural-language analytics layer worked until the modeling and governance came first — "garbage in, garbage out" was the team's own framing for why sequencing mattered.
Session speaker
Luke Kranz
Fanatics Betting & Gaming