How dbt Labs avoided years of SaaS costs and scaled organizational knowledge with Notion AI

In 2016, three former colleagues created a software platform called ‘dbt’ to help data engineers work like software developers. Documentation is a key component to how dbt supports organizations in delivering trusted data products with velocity. Built-in features like automatic documentation and visible lineage help data teams maintain data quality effortlessly, reuse existing code, and optimize data pipelines. As an open-source tool, dbt quickly became a key piece of data infrastructure for thousands of companies to create and disseminate their organizational knowledge. Today, dbt Labs (the creator of dbt) has catapulted to unicorn status with hundreds of employees in the last few years.

At the heart of dbt Labs' mission is the emphasis they put on their own employees contributing to the knowledge loop by “thinking in public and defaulting to open source.” This ethos finds a powerful echo in the strong culture of documentation they’ve worked hard to foster with their teams over the years. As a remote-first company with team members in multiple time zones across the world, Notion became their centralized, single source-of-truth for everyone to contribute to and iterate on shared organizational knowledge. This robust documentation is not just a byproduct of their teams’ work; it’s a key enabler.

But as their teams nearly doubled in size over the past year, the challenge became scaling a swell of documentation in parallel.

At the helm of the company’s globally distributed employee experience, Leigh Staub needed to rethink how documentation culture at dbt Labs would evolve with their rapidly growing teams.

Many employees didn’t know where to create or how to best maintain their documentation. That quickly led to information sprawl, where personal and company knowledge was spread far and wide across the dbt Labs workspace. Notion is an integral part of all of their teams’ workflows, but they needed to find a way to reliably reel in information from the far reaches of their workspace.

That’s where Notion AI came in. At the suggestion of their Customer Success Manager at Notion, Leigh enrolled dbt Labs in an alpha testing group to be among the first Notion customers to trial the newest Notion AI assistant features. “Almost overnight, when Notion AI was enabled, the power of our documentation was illuminated, like a lighthouse being turned on, solving for information sprawl in what was coming to be known as our Notion ocean” says Leigh.

Doubling down on their documentation culture with the power of Notion AI has had compounding effects for the daily workflows and impact of teams at dbt Labs, particular those that are customer-facing.

For example, Solutions Architects take notes on every customer engagement, including what’s working well for customers or where they need support. Instead of needing to hunt through pages and pages of notes, Notion AI cleans up those notes and gives them perfect memory going into their next engagement using all of those previous notes. Not only do those summaries help them better prepare for upcoming customer calls, they help inform other people and teams about what’s happening with their customer.

The Community team uses Notion to collect and organize product feedback that they hear from across the growing dbt community. But what happens to that feedback once it’s written down? With Notion AI, other teams throughout the org — like Product and Engineering — can now leverage synthesized insights from the wealth of community feedback that has been documented to make more informed decisions about what they should be prioritizing.

Technical Instructors teaching their customers how to use the newest features of dbt Labs’ growing product portfolio have to stay up to date with a lot of information that’s sometimes specific to a very particular product area. Using Notion AI, they’re able to pull information from a particular doc or teamspace to instantly incorporate the right information into their lesson plans.

“Notion AI has transformed this aspect of my work by automating the information discovery process,” says Senior Technical Instructor Faith Lierheimer. “I can use Notion AI as my assistant to eliminate spending hours of searching for the right information, which not only makes me more efficient but improves the quality and relevance of my work with our community.”

Companies can only be so productive when they’re spending too much time searching for information. The team at dbt Labs understood that challenge all too well, and wanted to proactively find a better way to work.

They also saved a ton of money on their tool stack in the process. By centralizing their organizational knowledge with strong documentation in Notion, dbt Labs has also been able to reduce or limit additional licenses for other team-specific tools, while also avoiding the need to purchase additional tools for enterprise AI or search altogether— saving them over $35k on their tool stack.

However, most people at dbt Labs say the real value of Notion AI ultimately goes beyond time saved searching or costs. It gives them the space to think bigger and more creatively, and spend time on more strategic work.

“More than anything, Notion AI just gives me a bit of breathing room. Since it can take care of the administrative grunt work, I’m able to focus on doing the work that I do best,” says Jerrie Kumalah, Resident Solutions Architect at dbt Labs.

Now, the knowledge that’s collected is no longer just Leigh’s or Faith’s or Jerrie’s. It’s dbt Labs’ shared knowledge, and it propels them forward faster than ever. Together.