How ALLIE AI Accelerates Productivity and Innovation

Nowadays, even those dismissive of AI’s value are still exposed to it daily. Whether you’re scrolling through Netflix, navigating to a new location with your smartphone, or asking Alexa for the latest Olympic updates, even daily tasks are adding AI to the customer experience equation in the background. Data platforms, which enable leaders to leverage AI, must integrate AI into their offerings to support those leaders, in turn. 

Alation recently hosted an insightful brief to demonstrate how our AI integrations help our end users. Product team members Salima Mangalji, Michael Moulsdale, and Edmond Leung led a webinar focused on Alation’s AI-powered features, specifically ALLIE AI, which enhances data quality, curation, and search capabilities. Here, we summarize the key takeaways from the session, highlighting the innovative features and future directions discussed.

Introduction to Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform

Salima Mangalji, product marketing manager, kicked off the webinar by introducing Alation’s Data Intelligence platform, emphasizing its ability to centralize metadata from disparate sources, thereby offering a unified and automated solution for data management. Alation is a platform that is built for everyone with an intuitive and integrated user experience designed for the needs of business data management and data engineering teams. The platform's open and extensible nature, with over 100 enterprise connectors and rich platform APIs, ensures seamless integration within existing ecosystems, offering faster time to value for organizations.

ALLIE AI: The Future of Intelligent Data Management

The webinar spotlighted ALLIE AI, Alation’s AI-powered productivity layer, which is designed to accelerate time to value by providing intelligent curation and search capabilities. Often, data teams face an overwhelming amount of data and struggle with limited resources for data stewardship. “ALLIE AI helps improve productivity and increase speed in a safe and trusted manner,” Mangalji noted, making it a crucial tool for organizations looking to democratize access to governed, contextual data.

Learn more: How Alation and Snowflake scale governance efforts with AI.

Intelligent Curation: Streamlining Data Stewardship

Senior product manager Michael Moulsdale explored the details of intelligent curation, a critical feature of ALLIE AI. He described the importance of having well-curated data in a catalog, as it forms the foundation for effective data utilization. “To be able to use the catalog well, we need a well-curated set of data,” Moulsdale emphasized. 

He introduced Suggested Stewards, a machine-learning-driven feature that identifies potential data stewards based on their interaction with enterprise data. “We use a custom machine-learning model that analyzes the use of the underlying data. So we take note of who is creating and consuming queries in your data. How many of those users are in the catalog, and how many of them have accounts? And from that, we will suggest stewards to you so that you can then accept or reject [them],” he shared. This feature helps organizations establish control and ownership over their data assets, a fundamental step in data governance.

To further aid in the curation process, ALLIE AI offers suggested descriptions for data assets. Moulsdale explained that the generative AI model behind this feature provides a starting point for creating data descriptions, a task that can often be daunting and time-consuming. “The feedback we get is it's much easier to edit than to write from scratch,” Moulsdale remarked, highlighting how the feature streamlines the description-writing process, enabling users to quickly get 75% of the description completed. 

Learn more: How Alation’s AI supports stewards.

Intelligent Search and Discovery: Enhancing Data Accessibility

Edmond Leung took the stage to discuss Intelligent Search and discovery, focusing on the integration of semantic and keyword search capabilities. He explained that while keyword search is effective for exact matches, it often yields overwhelming results for common terms. “The challenge, however, is that if you type in a search string that is short or common, you can probably find easily a thousand to a million documents,” Edmond explained. To address this, Alation has developed a semantic search feature that understands the meaning behind search queries, offering more relevant results.

During the demonstration, Edmond showcased how a search for “San Francisco average household income” yielded results not only matching the exact keywords but also brought up semantically similar concepts like “California” and “median income.” This blending of semantic and keyword search ensures users can find the most relevant data quickly and efficiently, enhancing the overall user experience.

Conclusion: A Unified Approach to Data Management

The webinar underscored Alation’s commitment to simplifying and enhancing data management through AI-powered solutions. The combination of intelligent curation and search capabilities provides users with the tools they need to manage data more effectively and efficiently. As Michael aptly summarized, “This is machine-suggested but human-verified, so you're always in control of what's going on.”

Alation's platform not only helps organizations navigate the complexities of data management but also sets the stage for future innovations. With a clear focus on AI and machine learning, Alation continues to lead the way in data intelligence, offering solutions that empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data assets.

This webinar provided valuable insights into the capabilities of Alation's platform and the future direction of its AI-powered features. As businesses increasingly rely on data-driven decision-making, tools like ALLIE AI will become indispensable in ensuring data quality, accessibility, and governance.

Curious to learn how Alation can help you supercharge your data management efforts? Book a demo with us today.