Matillion’s latest AI push has expanded to one of the world’s biggest data platforms, as the Manchester unicorn looks to automate more of the work traditionally carried out by data engineers.
The fast-growing software company has announced the general availability of Maia Foundation on Google BigQuery, extending its AI Data Automation platform to users of Google’s cloud data warehouse.
The move means Google BigQuery joins Snowflake, Databricks and Amazon Redshift as supported execution environments for Maia Foundation, which is designed to automate the construction, maintenance and governance of the data pipelines that feed enterprise data warehouses.
Rather than engineers manually building and updating those pipelines, Matillion says Maia uses autonomous AI agents to generate the orchestration and transformation logic, while tracking governance rules, data lineage and schema changes. Engineers then review and approve the work rather than creating it from scratch.
The launch also provides an upgrade path for organisations already using Matillion’s ETL tools with Google BigQuery, allowing them to migrate onto the Maia Foundation platform through a guided process.
Mark Johnston, chief marketing officer at Matillion, said: “Maia is now available for Google BigQuery, bringing the power of AI Data Automation to the Google Cloud ecosystem. We’re seeing massive shifts in productivity for enterprise data teams moving manual work to automated for up to 80-90% of work, freeing up teams from the backlog to deliver data outcomes across their business.
“The platform constructs and governs the pipelines; the engineer reviews and approves. Bringing that to BigQuery is significant. It opens autonomous data engineering to one of the largest data communities in the world, and it’s available today.”
According to Matillion, Maia addresses a different challenge to many AI tools currently emerging for data teams. While many focus on helping engineers write SQL code more quickly, Maia is designed to automate the creation and governance of the pipelines surrounding the data warehouse – work the company says accounts for much of the time involved in delivering enterprise data projects.
Maia Foundation on Google BigQuery is available immediately. Customers can deploy it either as a hybrid agent within their own environment or as a fully SaaS-based service through Matillion Hub.
The announcement marks another milestone for one of Manchester’s biggest technology success stories. Matillion achieved unicorn status in 2021 and has continued to expand its AI capabilities as enterprise demand for automated data engineering grows.
