Alation unveils AI agents plus SDK for agentic development
The data catalog vendor's new agents for documentation and data quality monitoring represent innovation among metadata management vendors and could force competitors to respond.
Alation on Monday unveiled Agentic Platform, a set of AI agents that automate data catalog capabilities including governance and discovery.
In addition, as part of the Alation Agentic Platform, the vendor introduced AI Agent SDK to provide customers with tools to develop their own AI agents. The Agentic Platform is now in beta testing, with general availability expected during the second quarter.
Agents are an evolution of generative AI. Unlike AI assistants and chatbots that enable users to query data in natural language and receive responses to inform decisions, agents act autonomously and semi-autonomously to surface insights, make suggestions and even take on repetitive tasks.
As a result, Alation's addition of agentic AI capabilities within the data catalog, plus providing customers the capabilities to build their own agents, is significant, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
"Alation is taking a big step forward, both in maturing the use of AI within its platform to realize a future with autonomous agents and also to expose these capabilities to developers seeking to build AI-driven and agentic applications through an industry-standard API," he said.
Based in Redwood City, Calif., Alation is a data catalog specialist. Its Data Intelligence Platform enables enterprises to integrate data from disparate departments and systems and organize data assets to make them discoverable.
In addition to the agentic AI capabilities, Alation unveiled a new marketplace for data products to make an organization's data assets easy to find, a set of guidelines and best practices for operationalizing data products and an AI-powered data quality monitoring tool.
The guidelines and best practices, called Data Products Playbook Expert Services, are generally available, while the others will be generally available later this year.
Agentic AI capabilities
With data volume increasing exponentially and AI development surging and enabling more employees within organizations to use data, metadata management and other data catalog capabilities have become overwhelming for many data stewards and data governance teams.
By using AI agents to automate time-consuming tasks that previously needed to be performed by humans, Alation's Agentic Platform aims to address some of the challenges related to data catalogs.
Alation's agents autonomously identify and resolve incomplete metadata, identify business requirements and apply organizational data governance policies. Once generally available, the initial agents will automate documentation, apply data quality rules to ensure data is accurate and timely, and, with the Agent SDK, enable developers to build their own AI agents using Alation's search and discovery capabilities.
It remains to be seen how much actual time will be saved by deploying such agents, given that they're still in beta testing, Henschen said. However, whether a transformative amount or just enough for workers to be a bit more efficient, Alation's agentic AI capabilities represent innovation among metadata management vendors.
Atlan has been among the more innovative metadata management and data governance vendors, while Collibra has been at the forefront of helping customers comply with emerging regulatory challenges, according to Henschen. Now, Alation is the vanguard.
This is the most visionary announcement I've seen in the metadata management space, to date, on how to both harness and facilitate agentic capabilities. With this announcement, Alation is pushing the market forward.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
"This is the most visionary announcement I've seen in the metadata management space, to date, on how to both harness and facilitate agentic capabilities," Henschen said. "With this announcement, Alation is pushing the market forward."
Stewart Bond, an analyst at IDC, similarly noted the significance of Alation's agentic AI capabilities, both regarding what they provide for the vendor's customers and the innovation they represent.
"Agentic architectures are the future of AI, and the Alation Agentic Platform has been designed to revolutionize data cataloging for AI by automating data discovery, governance and compliance management with agents," he said. "This new platform sets up Alation and its customers for success."
Competitors such as Informatica have launched assistants and chatbots, he continued. But adding agentic capabilities is at the leading edge among vendors specializing in data governance and metadata management.
"This is one of the first agentic capabilities we have seen in the data intelligence market," Bond said. "That being said, the Alation Agentic Platform is still early days. It is not fully autonomous, and humans are still in the loop, but it is an example of learning to walk after crawling and getting ready to run."
The idea for developing Alation Agentic Platform started with the vendor's recognition -- driven, in part, by customer feedback -- that the nature of data management has changed since Alation first launched its data catalog in 2015, according to Jonathan Bruce, the vendor's vice president of strategic customer advocacy.
Data volume has been rising fast, and regulations are constantly changing. Now, AI is adding another level of complexity.
"It's something we've heard firsthand from countless data leaders and our customers," Bruce said. "They want to -- and must -- drive business value without getting bogged down in the mechanics of data governance. … The Alation Agentic Platform [is] a reinvention of the data catalog for the AI era and embodies everything we've learned over the past 10 years."
The future
With two AI agents plus the Agent SDK part of the initial version of Alation's Agentic Platform, adding more agents is part of the vendor's roadmap for 2025, according to Jake Magner, Alation's senior director of product management.
He didn't provide specifics, but like the agents for documentation and data quality, they will take on critical tasks so data workers can be more efficient.
That continued focus on agentic AI is wise, according to Bond.
Competitors will likely respond quickly to Alation's unveiling of agentic AI capabilities, which will push Alation to continue being innovative to maintain an edge. However, whether it's Alation or another vendor pushing the market further forward, it remains to be seen whether enterprises truly turn over tasks to automated tools.
"We will be looking for Alation to continue its push forward on agentic AI in data intelligence," Bond said. "Competitors will take notice and respond. [But] the real question will be whether or not buyers are ready to let machines have more control."
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.
