Charts built for Chat

On September 14, 2026, dbt Labs announced the open sourcing of dbt Charts, a declarative language for dashboards that allows users to build dashboards by chatting with an agent while maintaining governance. The move signifies a shift from the traditional BI tools, which were once full-stack, bundling data ingestion, transformation, compute, caching, semantics, visualization, identity, and web hosting.

As the modern data stack has evolved, BI tools have become narrower, leaving charts as the most prominent component within their UI. However, with the rise of AI-powered chat agents fluent in code, SQL, and Git, the preference for building charts in code is gaining momentum. To facilitate this shift, dbt Labs has released dbt Charts, a new structured YAML language that can declare a full interactive dashboard in a single auditable YAML file.

The language combines SQL, which declares the data to be displayed, with YAML to declare how the data should be displayed. Alongside the language, dbt Labs has launched dbtCharts.com in public beta, a hosted platform for the rest of the BI solutions, which focuses on hosting, access control, and a UI.