Airbyte, creator of the open data movement platform, today announced semantic search in its context layer, enabling AI agents to find relevant information – such as customer conversations, documents and support tickets – with higher accuracy, and combine those findings with structured data in Snowflake and BigQuery. Available through the Airbyte Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the capabilities let users ask business questions in natural language from Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible AI assistants.

In addition, Airbyte expanded its certified connector portfolio and introduced improvements to BigQuery, MySQL and Zoom data connectors. The BigQuery source connector reads 1 terabyte of data in less than an hour – the fastest connector Airbyte has ever shipped.

The Airbyte context layer supports direct queries of Snowflake and BigQuery destinations containing data synced from more than 50 Airbyte source connectors. Semantic search adds the ability to search supported text sources by meaning, helping agents answer questions such as “Which customer accounts are the best prospects for upgrades?” using both business records and the context in customer interactions.

“An account record can tell you when a customer’s contract renews. A call transcript can tell you what would convince them to expand,” said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte. “We’re bringing those perspectives together so AI agents can find relevant evidence, connect it to business data and help people act on what they learn.”

Combining semantic search with SQL for business answers

Organizational knowledge often resides in unstructured text that keyword searches miss. A customer describing a product as “steep for what we’re getting” may be expressing a pricing concern without using the word “price.” A support ticket saying a dashboard “takes forever” may describe a performance issue without mentioning latency.

Airbyte’s semantic search retrieves information based on its meaning. Hybrid search capabilities combine semantic and keyword matching, preserving exact matches for terms such as product names and order numbers.

This makes it possible to ask questions such as:

  • Customer retention: Why did refunds increase last week, and which account plans were affected?

  • Sales opportunities: Which accounts raised concerns on calls this quarter, and what are their current opportunity stages?

  • Product feedback: Which support conversations describe slow performance following the latest update?

  • Business definitions: Where did we define an active customer, and which definition is most recent?

Search the data teams already sync

Airbyte indexes selected text fields from data customers already replicate, reducing the need to build a separate text-processing pipeline or manage a vector store for searches. Airbyte runs the embedding model on its own infrastructure, so text is not sent to a third-party embedding API.

Supported semantic search sources include Confluence, Gmail, Google Drive, Gong, Jira, Outreach, Pylon, Salesforce and Zendesk Chat. Through the MCP server, agents can combine semantic search, warehouse SQL queries and live reads from supported sources.

As an example, for Gmail this means an agent can find messages about a customer asking to postpone a renewal even when the emails use different wording. Retrieving relevant passages from an indexed replica also reduces the need for agents to page through live source APIs to locate information.

Expanded certified connectors and faster MySQL syncs

Airbyte also expanded its certified connector portfolio with Ashby, Gmail, MySQL, Pipedrive and Reddit Ads. Airbyte engineers maintain these connectors, back them with support service-level agreements and follow a published policy for breaking changes. The additions strengthen pipelines for operational and text-rich business data, including email conversations, recruiting feedback and sales notes.

The certified MySQL source introduces faster data movement, with supported connections delivering sync speeds four to 10 times faster than historical performance while using fewer resources. In a benchmark moving 170.68 GB from MySQL to Amazon S3 on Google Compute Engine, sync time fell from 95 minutes to 22 minutes while CPU and memory allocations declined by approximately 25%. Additional MySQL improvements expand parallel processing for large tables, allow interrupted single-partition snapshots to resume from their last checkpoint and improve recovery from transient change data capture errors.

Expanded BigQuery and Zoom data movement

Airbyte also introduced its rebuilt BigQuery source connector, which reads one terabyte of data in under an hour on Airbyte Cloud. The connector supports resuming interrupted syncs from the last checkpoint within BigQuery’s read-session window, helping teams move large datasets into their chosen destinations.

Airbyte’s Zoom source connector provides access to meeting and webinar records, participant reports, registration and poll data, webinar questions and answers, and Zoom Events. Teams can bring these records into their data platform to analyze attendance and engagement alongside customer and sales data. The Zoom connector supports OAuth authentication, incremental syncing for selected meeting, webinar and reporting streams.

Availability

Semantic search is available in Airbyte Cloud and Airbyte Enterprise Flex data planes managed by Airbyte. Organization administrators have full control over the context layer, after which authorized users can enable semantic search for supported connections and connect their AI assistant through the Airbyte MCP server.

For setup information, visit the Airbyte context layer documentation. New users can start a 14-day free trial of Airbyte Cloud.

About Airbyte

Airbyte is the open standard in data connectivity for AI and analytics. Its open-source engine, 700-plus connectors, and Connector Builder move data from any source into data warehouses or data lakes, with a context layer for AI agents. More than 25,000 companies, including 20% of the Fortune 500, run 2 million data pipeline syncs a day on Airbyte. Airbyte is available as a managed cloud instance, hybrid deployment model, or self-hosted open-source platform. Airbyte has been open source since 2020 and supports SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA Conduit compliance.

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