By accessing a knowledge layer consisting of curated data products and metadata, Chat with Your Data provides more accurate responses than the vendor's previous capabilities.
Alation on Tuesday unveiled Chat with Your Data, an agentic AI-powered feature that enables users to ask questions of their structured data using natural language rather than code.
Chat with Your Data, which is in beta preview with general availability expected during this year's fourth quarter, is the first feature developed by Alation using the AI capabilities it acquired when it purchased Numbers Station in May.
Alation already enables users to interact with data using natural language through Intelligent Search, a feature within the vendor's Allie AI portfolio. Intelligent Search, however, uses generative AI (GenAI) to help users find and understand data assets such as dashboards and reports, while Chat with Your Data is an agentic AI capability that accesses an enterprise's metadata to provide contextually aware responses to users' questions about their business.
As a result, Chat with Your Data, which will be available to customers of Alation's Data Products Marketplace, is a valuable new feature for the vendor's users, according to William McKnight, president of McKnight Consulting Group.
"Alation's Chat with Your Data feature has the potential to modernize how enterprises interact with structured data, making it more accessible, intuitive and actionable for business teams," he said. "By democratizing data access and providing accurate answers, it can drive faster decision-making, better outcomes and stronger business performance."
Based in Redwood, City, Calif., Alation is a data catalog and metadata management vendor whose Data Intelligence Platform enables users to integrate and organize data from different systems to make it discoverable. Competitors include Atlan, Collibra and Informatica, as well as tech giants that provide data catalog and metadata management capabilities, such as Microsoft and Oracle.
New capabilities
Agents have represented the vanguard in AI development over the past year.
Unlike generative AI assistants, agents have context awareness and reasoning capabilities, which enable them to not only recall and learn from past sessions but to also act autonomously. For example, agents can search an enterprise's data without being prompted, surfacing insights that humans might never think to seek out, and they can take on certain repetitive tasks such as checking data for accuracy and consistency and combing documents for relevant information.
Many data management vendors developed GenAI chatbots that enable users to interact with data without writing code, including Alation with its Intelligent Search. Rival Informatica was another, as were data management specialists including Alteryx and Boomi, among others.
With agents the next evolution of enterprise AI, many vendors have unveiled agentic AI-powered features.
Now, Alation is similarly adding agentic AI capabilities with Chat with Your Data.
Chat with Your Data features a query agent for structured data that responds to user questions by pulling information from both a knowledge layer as well as data itself. The knowledge layer, which provides contextual awareness, consists of curated data products and metadata that enterprises store in the Alation Data Intelligence Platform. Data, meanwhile, can be accessed where it's housed without forcing users to move it from databases and other storage formats into Alation's environment.
Alation's Chat with Your Data feature has the potential to modernize how enterprises interact with structured data, making it more accessible, intuitive and actionable for business teams. By democratizing data access and providing accurate answers, it can drive faster decision-making, better outcomes and stronger business performance.
William McKnightPresident, McKnight Consulting Group
Key capabilities include the contextual awareness provided by the knowledge layer, transparency with each response -- including an explanation demonstrating how it was curated -- and built-in adherence to an organization's user permissions and data governance rules.
"Alation's Chat with Your Data has some … features that set it apart from other similar tools," McKnight said. "It uses metadata-aware agents to improve answer accuracy and provide transparency, and it has an open architecture that works with various data systems."
Perhaps most significant is its contextual awareness, he continued, noting that one of the main challenges enterprises face when developing AI applications is maintaining metadata-informed context from one question to the next.
"This feature should improve answer accuracy, and it leverages Alation's existing data intelligence strengths," McKnight said. "By understanding business definitions and data context, it provides more accurate and trustworthy answers. This capability is a key differentiator for Alation's solution."
Likewise, Satyen Sangani, Alation's co-founder and CEO, highlighted the use of metadata to inform agentic AI-powered interactions with data.
Despite providing Intelligent Search, customers had been requesting easier ways of interacting with their data, he said. Alation's solution, using capabilities added through the Numbers Station acquisition, is to use metadata to give context to agentic AI responses.
Looking ahead
Just as Chat with Your Data aims to help Alation customers engage with their data, so will other upcoming new capabilities, according to Sangani.
"We're focused on … showcasing how AI is transforming the way organizations work with data [and] raising the stakes for precision, agility and trust," he said.
The vendor's most significant upcoming product development news will be revealed at revAlation Chicago on Oct. 1, he added.
McKnight, meanwhile, suggested that Alation improve its data quality and data quality management tools, noting that those are areas where the vendor's competitors provide strong capabilities.
"By developing more robust data quality features, Alation could potentially attract customers who prioritize data accuracy and reliability," he said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
