Fivetran to Become Steward of Great Expectations Open Source Data Quality Project
Fivetran announced May 13 that it will steward the Great Expectations open source community and GX Core data quality framework, keeping the project fully community-driven while advancing its Open Data Infrastructure vision for AI-era analytics.
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Overview
Fivetran, the data foundation for AI, announced on May 13, 2026, that it plans to become steward of the Great Expectations open source community and GX Core project, one of the industry’s most widely used open source data quality frameworks Fivetran.
Under the planned transition, GX Core will remain an open source, community-driven project. Fivetran intends to support ongoing project maintenance, ecosystem integrations, and community engagement while hiring engineering talent experienced with the GX Core project Fivetran.
The stewardship advances Fivetran’s Open Data Infrastructure vision for open, interoperable systems that power analytics and AI without vendor lock-in Fivetran The New Stack.
What We Know
Great Expectations (GX) enables data teams to define, validate, and monitor data quality across modern data platforms, helping improve trust in analytics, operations, and AI systems. The framework has seen widespread adoption, with historical usage cited in the tens of millions of monthly downloads in related coverage Fivetran.
In the announcement, Fivetran Chief Product Officer Anjan Kundavaram emphasized the AI-driven need for open systems: “AI increases the importance of open and trustworthy data systems. Practitioners need infrastructure that works across clouds, platforms, and tools without locking them into closed ecosystems. The GX community has built an important part of that foundation.” Fivetran.
Great Expectations CEO Hernan Alvarez welcomed the move: “The GX community has always focused on helping practitioners build systems they can trust. We believe Fivetran understands the growing importance of open, reliable data infrastructure in the AI era and is well positioned to help support the continued growth of the GX Core community.” Fivetran.
The same day, in an interview with The New Stack at Google Cloud Next, Kundavaram elaborated on the broader pressures facing data infrastructure in the agent era. AI agents can generate ten or a hundred times more queries than human-era analytics workflows, often routing every request through the same expensive compute paths in closed systems The New Stack.
“It’s kind of like using a Lamborghini to mow the lawn all the time,” Kundavaram said of over-provisioning costly compute for routine agent tasks. Agents behave differently from humans: “An agent could go spend more time if the agent thinks you’re going to save 10x the cost.” The New Stack.
When data lives fragmented across systems without consolidated context, the result is what Kundavaram called a “triple whammy”: poor AI answers, sharply higher costs from excessive queries, and wasted effort on weak context The New Stack.
Fivetran has been building supporting capabilities, including data lake interoperability work on Google Cloud and the donation of SQLMesh to the Linux Foundation in March 2026 The New Stack.
What We Don’t Know
Specific terms of the stewardship agreement, the timeline for completing the transition, and any changes to governance or contribution processes remain undisclosed. Fivetran stated that “additional details regarding the transition and future stewardship plans will be shared following completion of the agreement.” Fivetran.
It is also not yet clear how the stewardship will affect the separate Great Expectations Cloud offering or integration priorities with Fivetran’s own platform.
Analysis
The announcement arrives as organizations grapple with the economics of agentic AI. Closed data stacks that worked for human-driven BI queries face a different cost curve when autonomous agents issue orders of magnitude more requests. Fivetran’s framing—that open, multi-engine infrastructure with semantic discipline offers the sustainable path—aligns the GX stewardship with a larger industry shift toward interoperable data foundations The New Stack.
By taking stewardship rather than pursuing an outright acquisition, Fivetran signals an intent to sustain the community-driven nature of GX Core while injecting resources for maintenance and ecosystem growth. Whether enterprises accelerate adoption of open data infrastructure before agent-driven query costs mount remains the open variable.