Governed by default: how data teams at Nordstrom turning dbt governance into an AI advantage

In this session, We will share how Nordstrom’s retail data teams at scale is using dbt governance and semantics to build an AI‑ready analytics foundation, and enable AI driven analytics. We’ll walk through how a single question — “What would it take for our data to answer questions on its own, and hold up under interrogation?” — reframed dbt from pipeline plumbing into the control surface for safe AI. I’ll show how we’re treating freshness as an AI SLA, using tests, contracts, and lineage as guardrails, and designing a “Data Concierge” conversational agent that answers merchants’ questions in plain English against governed data. Attendees will get a realistic view of the challenges, tradeoffs, and patterns a large enterprise is using to make its analytics platform ready for LLMs.