With the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit underway in Florida, Alation has made three major announcements. The leader in data intelligence has launched an Agentic Platform, a new data products marketplace. Also, Alation Data Quality (DQ), an AI-powered solution that improves data quality automatically.
Agentic AI is making its way into nearly every vendor’s portfolio. Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched, the first generative AI and now Agentic AI solutions are being launched and rolled out across enterprises worldwide.
The initial investments in AI projects were not always successful. However, vendors are identifying the pain points organisations face and developing cost-effective solutions to deal with them. Data quality, manually checking every element is impossible, is an obvious place where AI can make a huge difference.
These announcements from Alation provide a coherent next-generation set of capabilities that provide the foundation for organisations to solve some of their most difficult data challenges.
Agentic Platform
The new Agentic Platform is set to reinvent how data catalogues operate. Using Agentic AI Agents, the platform will automate and guide data discovery, governance, and compliance management. The solution is not isolated from other enterprise applications. As Alation has released an SDK to help organisations build and deploy additional agents to further enhance data intelligence.
The SDK supports Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). It isn’t clear whether Alation will support other models in the future.
Within the guardrails of Anthropic MCP, organisations can now automate time-consuming and manual data management processes with Agents. These agents can identify business requirements, resolve incomplete metadata, and apply data governance policies.
It means that agents, rather than the data stewards, will automatically update documentation as data assets evolve. These changes can align with external regulations and the business value of the data held.
Satyen Sangani, Co-Founder and CEO at Alation, commented, “Alation came out of stealth to launch the data catalogue in 2015. Over the last ten years, we’ve been privileged to serve over 600 customers and 40% of the Fortune 100 on their data management journeys.
“During this time, data teams have faced steadily increasing demands as data sources have proliferated, regulation has increased, and business needs have intensified. Data teams need to realize value faster than ever.
“While AI is creating increasing pressure on data teams, it will also come to their aid. With today’s Agentic Platform launch, we allow data teams to focus on value instead of getting lost in the maze of tools, processes, policies or metadata. We are excited to see these AI agents dramatically increase data teams’ productivity and capabilities.”
What does the platform deliver
The new platform will be available from Q2 2025. It is currently in beta testing. Alation did not give a specific date.
Statista estimates that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecasted to increase rapidly, reaching 149 zettabytes in 2024. Over the next by 2028, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 394 zettabytes.
Manually updating and correcting that data is impossible in any organisation by people alone. Digital employees, such as Agentic AI Agent, can complete tasks in a fraction of the time. The new Alation Agentic platform will enable organisations to maintain the quality of their data.
The platform will initially have these capabilities:
- Documentation: The Documentation agent automatically ingests, organizes, and connects content to relevant data assets, enriching the understanding of data and the impact of documentation.
- Data Quality: The Data Quality agent leverages Alation’s knowledge base to automatically create and apply data quality rules to ensure business analysts, reporting dashboards, and LLM training datasets contain accurate and timely information.
- AI Agent SDK: The Agent SDK enables organizations to build their own AI agents powered by the search and discovery capabilities of the Alation Platform. These capabilities are delivered as tools that support Anthropic’s MCP and can be accessed through an Alation sandbox.
Data Products Marketplace
Alongside the new Agentic platform, Alation announced the Alation Data Products Marketplace and a new Data Products Expert Services offering. Still in beta, and scheduled to be available in Q3 2025, will enable organisations to publish, find, and use high-quality, reusable data products for people, business applications, and AI agents.
Jake Magner, Senior Director of Product Management at Alation, commented, “With AI adoption accelerating and creating even more strain on over-burdened data teams, organizations need a scalable, governed approach to data products to keep up with the demands of the business.
“Our Data Products Marketplace and expert services provide a complete solution that enables businesses to balance speed with trust—delivering high-quality, reusable data products quickly that drive smarter AI and impactful business insights.”
Alation Data Products Expert Services
Available immediately, the new expert services will provide hands-on guidance and best practices for defining, managing, and delivering data products that align with business goals. Alation’s Expert Services are designed to help operationalize data initiatives to help align teams, and deliver measurable value while adapting to stakeholder needs.
The expert services include:
- Right start implementation professional services
- Comprehensive Data Catalogue Migration support
- A Customer Success Advisor
- A Customer Engagement Advisor and
- A Technical Account Manager
Alation identified the benefits as delivering:
- Align people, processes, and technology to maximize data product effectiveness.
- Implement a producer/consumer model that fosters collaboration and accountability.
- Launch pilot initiatives to prove value and establish repeatable success.
- Scale data products strategically to drive long-term business impact.
Agentic Data Quality Solution
Alation Data Quality (DQ) is an AI-powered solution that automates the identification, monitoring and analysis of critical data assets against relevant quality rules.
Maintaining data quality is difficult. It involves monitoring vast quantities of data, validating it and then, as anomalies are surfaced, correcting the data so that it has a higher level of accuracy. Many companies have processes to do some of this. But DQ is aiming to help organisations automate the entire process from identification to correction using Agentic AI.
Data teams will now have the ability to monitor and improve the quality of data across the organisation. Rather than having to prioritise the urgent cases that are often at the end of the process. Data quality rules can be imposed, updated and re-imposed with a minimum of human effort.
DQ can also integrate with other Data Quality solutions in use by organisations. They are also able to leverage the Alation Data Quality platform governance, lineage, and metadata to deliver a unified view of data health.
Alation DQ leverages an AI Agent that assesses and understands the context. Thus enabling it to quickly analyses data within the Alation Data Intelligence Platform. Alation gave an example use case of a retailer:
“The DQ Agent can automatically detect which columns relate to order information and apply rules to flag missing or incomplete fields. When issues arise, the DQ Agent provides root cause analysis and remediation recommendations by leveraging the full breadth of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform – such as end-to-end data lineage – to ensure teams can swiftly address data quality gaps.”
The Capabilities of the Alation Data Quality Solution
Alation highlighted the capabilities of its new Data Quality solution, stating:
- Measure what matters: Alation DQ prioritizes the most business-critical data assets using real consumption patterns, eliminating guesswork and reducing costs.
- Automatically generate data quality rules: AI-powered automation detects data types, usage contexts, and governance policies. It applies relevant quality rules, ensuring proactive monitoring without manual effort.
- Integrated data quality and data governance reporting: Access a holistic view of the entire data landscape with the ability to zoom in to table- and column-level views of data quality health and data governance policy status in a single interface.
- Unified user experience: Seamlessly integrated with the Alation Data Intelligence Platform. Alation DQ leverages rich metadata and business lineage for a streamlined, intuitive experience.
GT Volpe, Senior Director of Product Management at Alation, commented, “Trust is the foundation of data-driven decision-making, yet many organizations struggle with fragmented, unreliable data. Alation DQ delivers an intelligent, scalable, and open solution that ensures data quality while maximizing the value of enterprise data.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
In the Age of AI, which 2025 is fast becoming, data is the key component that feeds AI. As with other computer technology, the output is only as good as the input. Improving data quality is, therefore, essential for organisations. These new tools and services announced and delivered by Alation will enable organisations to improve the data quality of their information. They can then better rely on the insights that AI provides across multiple use cases.
