Alation Introduces Agentic Platform to Automate Data Management and Governance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 4, 2025 — Alation Inc. has announced the launch of its Agentic Platform. This reinvention of the data catalog for the AI era introduces the use of agents to automate and guide data discovery, governance, and compliance management. In addition, Alation also announced its AI Agent SDK, with support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling partners and customers to build agents and applications leveraging the data intelligence capabilities of the Alation Platform.

Data management, governance, and cataloging programs have traditionally been complex, requiring alignment and execution across many stakeholders. While all team members need access to data, no one person or team has complete knowledge about the data, nor the rules for using it. As a result, data program owners must catalog an organization’s data assets, agree on documentation standards, and define governance policies.

Data consumers must then learn how to access this information while adhering to compliance standards. On an ongoing basis, data stewards must update documentation as data assets change, and data governance teams must update privacy and compliance policies as regulation evolves. All of these efforts are evaluated against the business value they deliver.

With the ever-growing volume of data and increasing regulatory requirements, even more is being asked of data teams. Yet, with budget constraints hindering hiring, and the institutional knowledge that data management professionals possess not easily replicated, data teams have found it difficult to prioritize, execute, and scale. Consequently, for many organizations, this has resulted in governance programs that deliver limited business value.

The Alation Agentic Platform addresses these challenges by leveraging agents to automate time-consuming and manual data management processes. The agents automatically identify business requirements, resolve incomplete metadata, and apply data governance policies. These workflows combine data management domain knowledge with the metadata captured in the data catalog to create workflows that are tailored to the institutional context of each organization. In this way, the agents are able to distribute and act on information that was previously held by a small number of data management professionals. This enables data teams to significantly increase their productivity and accelerate the delivery of business-critical initiatives.

Alation’s AI Agent SDK extends access to data management best practices, and trusted data and metadata to a new ecosystem of technology partners, enabling enterprises to catalyze innovation. Application and AI developers can now programmatically access the context within the Alation Agentic Platform – through Anthropic’s MCP – to deliver safer, more engaging user experiences that build higher levels of customer trust. For example, organizations building customer service chatbots can leverage the Alation Platform to inform a chatbot’s responses and verify that these responses comply with all applicable data governance policies.

“Alation came out of stealth to launch the data catalog 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,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO at Alation. “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 agents dramatically increase data teams’ productivity and capabilities.”

Initial agentic capabilities include:

• Documentation: The Documentation Agent automatically ingests, organizes, and connects content to relevant data assets, enriching the understanding of data and impact of documentation.
• Data Quality: The Data Quality (DQ) 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 AI 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.

These capabilities are currently in beta and are expected to be generally available starting in Q2 2025.

About Alation

Alation is the data intelligence company. More than 600 global enterprises — including 40% of the Fortune 100 — rely on Alation to realize value from their data and AI initiatives. Customers such as Cisco, DocuSign, Nasdaq, Pfizer, and Samsung trust Alation’s platform for self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI-ready data, fostering data-driven innovation at scale. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Alation has been recognized five times by Inc. Magazine as one of the Best Workplaces.

Source: Alation