A 60% Accuracy Leap? Alation Ties AI to Your Data Context

(Shutterstock AI Generator)

Natural language access to enterprise data is no longer enough. Business teams need answers they can trust, but too often, responses from AI assistants are inconsistent, misleading, or stripped of context. That’s because most tools don’t understand how a company defines its metrics or where the data comes from. Some also create governance issues by requiring data to be copied into new environments or by bypassing access controls.

Alation says its new feature, Chat with Your Data, addresses these challenges. It uses business glossaries, data lineage, and curated data products to interpret user questions with more precision. The responses are tied to the original data and the SQL used to retrieve it, and everything runs within existing governance structures; no duplication or policy changes required.

The company reports that this setup improves answer accuracy by as much as 60% compared to standard large language model (LLM) tools. It sees the feature not just as a product update, but as part of a broader shift toward more trustworthy, everyday decision-making with data.

“Alation Chat with Your Data is a realization of our founding vision: to empower a curious and rational world,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation. “By helping people ask better questions and understand and trust the answers, we’re making data-driven thinking part of everyday work. Instead of digging through dashboards or waiting for analysts, users can simply ask a question and get a clear, trustworthy answer in seconds.”

This new generation of metadata-aware assistants marks a shift from generic chatbots. Alation says the feature was designed for enterprise environments, drawing on the specific terms and structures already in place.

Underneath the new assistant is a structure Alation calls a “knowledge layer”, which is not just metadata, but a curated map of how the business organizes its data. The company says this is what lets the system understand what users really mean, and why the answers it gives stay grounded in how things actually work across the organization.

Traditional data catalogs treated access as a destination. Users had to log into a platform, search manually, and navigate complex hierarchies. This is an experience geared towards data stewards, not everyday business users. 

Alation’s new approach flips that model. Instead of expecting users to come to the data, it brings metadata-rich answers to users where they are, through a conversational interface powered by AI agents. This shift reframes self-service from dashboard hunting to context-aware querying. 

Some of Alation’s competitors have been exploring the use of  AI-powered data assistants. Big players like Databricks and Snowflake have already baked metadata tools into their platforms. Others like Informatica, Collibra, and Atlan have spent years building out governance layers and experimenting with conversational interfaces.

The release also marks the first major product built using technology from Numbers Station, the AI startup Alation acquired in May. According to the company, Chat with Your Data is currently in beta and is expected to launch broadly in the fourth quarter.

What Alation aims to do differently is focus on metadata and agent evaluation rather than compute. The company says its architecture is built to support precision agents that can be tested, tuned, and deployed without being tied to any one data platform. That strategy may appeal to enterprises concerned about vendor lock-in.

Alation’s new assistant is already being put to use. At Euromonitor International, the tool has been integrated into the company’s Passport AI platform, giving clients a new way to interact with market data.

“At Euromonitor, our data empowers companies to shape critical decisions in markets around the world. By integrating Alation Chat with Your Data into our Passport AI platform, we are making it easier than ever for our clients to interrogate that data,” said Lamine Lahouasnia, Director of Gen AI, Euromonitor. “They can now uncover strategic insights on local and global trends through simple conversation, all while maintaining the trust, accuracy, and control they expect from us.”

(Shutterstock AI Image)

Earlier this year, Alation acquired Numbers Station, a startup known for developing AI agents tailored to structured data. Its technology now underpins Chat with Your Data, providing a framework rooted in metadata and agent evaluation rather than generic language prompts. The acquisition supports Alation’s ongoing push to make AI more business-aware and to ensure tools operate securely and accurately across different enterprise environments.

With Numbers Station’s tech now embedded, Alation is betting that metadata-aware agents can bring new clarity to enterprise data. It would be interesting to see whether other vendors scale or introduce their own metadata-first strategies. 

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