Happy New Year! I have some exciting news to share: Hernan Alvarez is stepping into the role of CEO at Great Expectations (GX). He'll be leading the company forward, focusing on continued commercialization, partnerships and integrations, and realizing the potential of AI within the GX platform.
Hernan's journey with GX began in 2022 as VP of Product, where he's done a fantastic job launching GX Cloud and building the GX platform into what enterprises need from an end-to-end data quality solution. His unique blend of people-first leadership, product strategy, and hands-on operational experience makes him the ideal leader to guide GX as we continue to grow and evolve.
For my part, I'll be taking on a new role, focused on expanding the reach and impact of GX in the larger data governance, tooling, and infrastructure ecosystem. Similarly, James Campbell will serve as a strategic advisor, guiding our AI development. Over the last 7 years, Great Expectations has grown to become the most widely adopted data quality tool in the world, now averaging roughly 20M downloads per month. I'm proud of what the GX team has accomplished and look forward to contributing to the company's future success.
Why it matters
I'm also excited for GX's next chapter. Our mission—to revolutionize the speed and integrity of data collaboration—is more important now than ever. Here's why:
1. Data quality is a source of competitive advantage
When we started Great Expectations, data quality was viewed primarily as a technical challenge. Now, the industry recognizes that successful data utilization requires strong collaboration between technical and business teams. This shift is reflected in increased data governance budgets and deeper integration between tools—from data orchestrators and catalogs to testing systems and platforms.
2. The world needs more shared facts
In today's political climate, ideological differences often prevent people from accepting common truths. Technology can't fully solve this problem, but it can help by creating trusted information within organizations. GX serves this need by making data supply chains transparent, helping teams build confidence in shared facts and make better decisions.
3. Preparing for the AI Revolution
As AI technologies gain adoption, they're creating new demands for data quality and observability throughout organizations. AI systems are structuring previously unstructured data, necessitating new interfaces into data warehouses and lakes, and creating strong demand for robust quality controls to ensure reliable outputs.
GX is perfectly positioned as a foundational tool for AI agents working with data. It offers deterministic data validation with clear, structured interfaces that map naturally to how AIs think about data constraints. Most importantly, it bridges human and machine understanding by expressing data quality rules in both human-readable and machine-executable forms.
What comes next
Under Hernan's leadership, GX is positioned to address the growing demand for robust data quality and observability solutions in an AI-driven world. Our strategic priorities include expanding our platform capabilities, accelerating innovation, focusing on ecosystem integrations, and advancing our AI technologies.
Since launching our beta GX Cloud version in 2023 and rolling out our public preview in 2024, we've achieved remarkable market traction. Our strategic approach to pricing and packaging has resonated strongly with enterprise customers, driving steady sales growth and fostering strong market momentum.
I'm incredibly excited about the road ahead and want to invite our community, partners, and customers to embark on this next stage of our journey together.
