Alation has unveiled its AI Governance solution. It claims it will help companies realise value from their data and AI initiatives. The core of this solution is about ensuring AI models are built using secure, compliant and well-documented data.
The solution comes with many capabilities, including audits, data tagging, data discovery and more. It will let organisations know where their data comes from and meet ever-increasing compliance demands. Current regulation includes GDPR, the EU AI Act, and frameworks like the OECD AI Principles and NIST AI Risk Management Framework,
Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation said, “The potential for AI to revolutionize industries—from preventing financial fraud to accelerating drug development—is immense, but realizing that potential and driving true business value depends on trusted, high-quality data.
“Alation’s AI Governance solution ensures AI initiatives are built on secure, compliant, and transparent data, enabling faster innovation with confidence. As enterprises continue to invest in AI infrastructure to scale large models, Alation turns those investments into real-world applications that deliver measurable ROI, reduce risk, and scale AI safely and ethically—unlocking significant business value.”
The need for AI governance
Perhaps the biggest challenge for organisations when it comes to AI is governance. Regulators are demanding accountability over AI. They have recognised the risk that AI poses to data privacy. As such, being able to show where data came from and being able to protect sensitive data is now a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
To meet that demand, Alation’s new AI governance solution is active, not passive. It starts by cataloguing the data used in training datasets. Organisations can quickly identify where sensitive data is used and ensure they put processes in place to secure that data.
It also catalogues LLM prompts, giving an organisation insight into what is being asked. From there, it is possible to track how the LLM responds to the prompt. It also makes it possible to see what caused the creation of connections between different pieces of data. If the LLM is handling sensitive data such as PII, this step shows how it connects that PII together.
All this creates transparency that ensures an organisation can identify errors and biases and then put remedial actions in place. From a compliance perspective, this meets the needs of regulators.
Alation also claims that built-in AI governance will streamline AI development. It also listed five things its AI Governance solution enables organizations to achieve.
Accurate Datasets for Trusted Models
Alation equips data scientists, ML experts, and AI engineers with trusted, compliant, contextual data. By leveraging Alation’s Intelligent Search and custom tags, users can quickly locate and tag relevant and compliant datasets needed to build trusted AI models, ensuring a strong foundation for AI initiatives.
Streamlined AI Documentation and Collaboration
Alation provides a single source of truth for documenting and managing AI models using model card templates. By centralizing collaboration within the AI Governance solution, teams can collaborate in the context of specific models, ensuring unified visibility across all stakeholders. This promotes governance, compliance, and the efficient discovery and sharing of AI/ML models across the enterprise, driving operational efficiency and transparency.
Auditable AI Lineage and Traceability
Alation delivers end-to-end lineage from datasets to AI models, offering full visibility into the AI lifecycle. By cataloging training datasets, LLM prompts, AI models, and output data in a single source of truth, Alation ensures traceability for internal stakeholders and auditors. This enables organizations to diagnose issues, enforce compliance, and maintain trust in AI systems, embedding safety, ethics, and governance throughout the entire process.
Compliance and Risk Mitigation
Alation’s AI and data governance framework flags non-compliant datasets and ensures AI models are built on reliable, governed data. This mitigates operational risks, prevents costly errors, and safeguards data integrity—ensuring organizations meet the highest regulatory standards while driving innovation.
AI Readiness Accelerator
Alation’s Expert Services offering accelerates AI adoption by providing expert guidance and best practices for model card development. Customers can also engage system integrators from the Alation ecosystem to implement these practices, ensuring they are prepared to scale AI initiatives and deliver measurable business impact.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Regulators are paying a lot of attention to AI at the moment. There is real concern over the way it uses and misuses data, especially when it comes to PII. That has been exacerbated by OpenAI saying that it cannot stop chatGPT from making up facts about people. It has also admitted it cannot remove data that its AI has created or used.
From a corporate perspective, using AI to provide better access and insight into corporate data is a key issue. Many are realising that the key benefit to them is to build AI models on the data they hold. However, that creates questions over data privacy, control, accuracy and the ability to correct and delete.
Organisations must begin by using clean data to meet regulators’ demands. They also need to document how it is brought into the AI model. Alation is focusing its attention on this with its new AI Governance solution. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next year and if it can, as promised, provide accountability.
