Motive is an AI-powered operations platform that improves the safety, productivity, and profitability of businesses powering the physical economy. With a focus on delivering actionable insights through data, Motive depends on robust data infrastructure to support critical business decisions.

• Days instead of months to implement dbt™ and begin delivering business value

• 10x productivity boost for Motive's 16 person data team through AI-enhanced development

• 1-2 person-months saved annually by eliminating DevOps overhead

• Accelerated financial data delivery meeting critical deadlines

• Simplified workflow with integrated CI/CD and automated testing

• Predictable costs with user-based pricing model

The Challenge

When Jay Rosenthal joined Motive as Director of Data Science & Engineering, he discovered a data infrastructure that wasn't leveraging the power of dbt™ for SQL-based data pipelines. Having previous experience with dbt™, Rosenthal and his team recognized its potential to accelerate delivery for stakeholders through its robust development workflow and automated data testing capabilities.

Motive needed to refactor its financial data infrastructure, and Rosenthal had to build this infrastructure and a team from scratch quickly. He faced a critical decision: Should his team implement dbt™ Core and handle all the DevOps themselves, or invest in a managed platform? The key challenge was delivering business value quickly without getting bogged down in infrastructure management that wasn't core to Motive's market differentiation.

"I didn't want to use dbt™ Core because the real value for my business stakeholders was in using the data itself," explained Rosenthal. "Spending time on DevOps for dbt™ Core would only delay my ability to deliver business value and force me to handle work I'm not specialized in. Managing data pipelines for business analytics isn't how Motive gains a competitive advantage in our market."

The Solution

After evaluating different options, Rosenthal chose Paradime for its developer-first approach and predictable pricing model. When other Motive data teams saw the speed and quality with which Rosenthal delivered new financial data sets, two other Motive teams chose to adopt Paradime. Now with more than 16 users across the organization, Paradime has become the standard platform for data work at Motive, providing a consistent and powerful environment for all data practitioners.

AI-Enhanced Developer Experience

Paradime supercharges Motive's 16-person data team with an integrated platform that combines robust engineering tools with AI capabilities. This transforms slow, manual SQL development into rapid, AI-enhanced workflows.

"What I needed was the ability to execute git commands and have a complete terminal and IDE experience," Rosenthal said. "Paradime was clearly designed with data engineers in mind, providing a developer-first environment that streamlines complex data modeling tasks in ways that analyst-focused tools simply can't match."

The DinoAI assistant accelerates SQL development organization-wide, transforming how the entire team works rather than serving as just an optional feature.

"DinoAI has transformed my development process," Rosenthal shared. "Having it integrated directly into my development environment means I never have to context-switch, making my coding significantly faster and more efficient."

One of his favorite applications is a custom prompt he developed called clean next select that streamlines SQL query formatting. "I created a specific prompt for DinoAI that I call clean next select. It allows me to write my code, paste it in, apply the prompt, and get back perfectly formatted SQL." This approach eliminates the common typos and inconsistencies that typically occur with manual formatting methods like find and replace.

The dinorules feature ensures consistent styling preferences across all generated code, standardizing output across Motive's entire data organization.

Bolt for Seamless Orchestration

Beyond the Code IDE, Motive leverages Paradime's Bolt for scheduling and orchestration. The simplicity of setting up and managing scheduling through Bolt eliminated another potential DevOps burden, allowing the entire data team to focus on delivering data value.

"Bolt is essential to the entire setup," Rosenthal explained. "There's no point in just having an IDE without scheduling capabilities. What makes Bolt stand out is how straightforward the scheduling process is."

The CI integration within Bolt proved particularly valuable as the team scaled. "The built-in CI workflow is a game-changer for our development process," said Rosenthal. "With minimal setup effort, we can automatically block pull requests that would break our daily data pipelines or impact downstream dependencies. This ensures our production code stays reliable without requiring complex configuration."

Predictable Pricing

For Motive, the user-based pricing model was a significant advantage, enabling straightforward budgeting without having to consider how code structure or model count might affect costs, especially as they scaled to 10+ users across multiple teams.

"Paradime's pricing model gave us complete cost predictability, which was a huge relief," Rosenthal noted.

"I didn't have to worry about unexpected expenses appearing throughout the year or factor in how our code structure might impact our overall costs. This made budgeting straightforward and eliminated a major source of uncertainty."

The Impact

Implementing Paradime allowed Motive to begin delivering business value in days rather than months, bypassing the DevOps overhead that would have delayed the project by 4 to 6 weeks. As the standard data platform for all 16+ data practitioners, the organizational impact has been substantial.

"Instead of spending weeks on infrastructure setup and maintenance, I could immediately focus on analyzing our business data and delivering insights to stakeholders."

Rosenthal estimates that using Paradime saves approximately 1-2 months of full-time data work annually on DevOps tasks across the organization. This translates to significant cost savings when considering the fully-loaded cost of engineering resources.

Most importantly, Paradime's ease of use and powerful features helped Rosenthal meet critical deadlines for refactoring Motive's financial data. "The speed at which Paradime enabled me to deliver business value was crucial to my success in this role. It allowed me to meet tight deadlines for our financial data refactoring project that would have been impossible otherwise."

The exceptional support from the Paradime team has also contributed to this success. "The level of service from Paradime is truly unmatched. Whenever I encountered an issue, their team responded with extraordinary speed to help troubleshoot, which was instrumental to our success with the platform."

What's Next

With its data infrastructure now running efficiently on Paradime, Motive continues to refine its data workflows and expand the use of dbt™ across the organization. With 16+ users already on the platform, Paradime has established itself as the standard for data work at Motive. The team is exploring additional Paradime features to further enhance productivity and collaboration.

For Motive, the focus remains on delivering business value through high-quality data models, with Paradime providing the foundation that makes this possible without the distraction of infrastructure management. The AI-enhanced developer experience and exceptional support continue to be key factors in Motive's success with Paradime.