In analytics engineering, speed is the headline that sells, but trust is the foundation that lasts. dbt Labs' 2026 report makes this clear: 83% of data teams now prioritize trust when using AI. That figure should stop any organization from chasing flashy outputs at the expense of reliable data. It tells us that the conversation around AI in analytics has matured, teams are no longer asking "how fast can this model run?" but "can we stand behind every number it produces?" This is not a minor preference shift. It is a structural change in how data teams evaluate their tools and their workflows.
For users of AI-native spreadsheet technology, this finding matters directly. If your team is like the 83%, you are already feeling the tension between the ease of AI-generated insights and the responsibility of getting those insights right. The practical takeaway is that speed without verification is noise. A model that generates a hundred numbers a second is useless if even one of those numbers leads a stakeholder to a bad decision. Trust, on the other hand, compounds. When you know the source, the logic, and the lineage of data, you move faster in the long run because you stop wasting cycles on double-checking. The progressive data team treats trust as a feature, not a tax.
The other 17% are not wrong to care about speed, latency matters, especially in real-time applications. But the data teams that build trust into their AI foundation today are the ones who will scale their analytics work tomorrow. They are the ones whose dashboards will hold up under audit, whose forecasts will be acted on without hesitation, and whose tools will integrate into broader decision-making processes without friction. The report's findings suggest that trust is not slowing teams down; it is enabling a different kind of velocity, one that does not require backtracking.
So when you evaluate your next AI-capable tool, start with a simple question: does this tool make it easier or harder to know where the data came from? The answer separates a foundation you can build on from one you will have to rebuild.