Introducing the Alation AI Agent SDK: Easily Build Smarter Agents

By Robb Gibson

Published on 2025年3月10日

The pressure to deliver AI-driven innovation has never been higher, whether you are using off-the-shelf solutions or creating custom tools to meet specific business needs. While many AI teams are in the experimentation stage, piloting new AI projects, leading companies are already capturing substantial returns on investment. According to a recent Deloitte survey, 74% of respondents reported advanced Generative AI initiatives are meeting or exceeding ROI expectations, and 78% of respondents expect to increase their AI spending next year.

Furthermore, organizations are increasingly embracing agentic AI as a path to enhancing efficiency and innovation. These autonomous systems handle complex tasks with minimal human input. Gartner projects that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will incorporate agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024. This highlights a clear strategic shift toward adopting agentic AI to maintain competitive advantage.

Yet, despite this potential, AI success is not guaranteed. Enterprises face significant hurdles, including:

Using relevant, trusted, and high-quality data to feed AI systems
Generating credible, accurate, and trustworthy results
Easily developing applications and agents and using multiple tools together

To help our customers overcome these challenges, Alation has introduced the Alation AI Agent SDK.

How the Alation AI Agent SDK solves core AI challenges

The Alation AI Agent SDK equips application developers and AI teams with tools specifically designed to overcome these common hurdles:

1. Accessing trusted and high-quality data

The SDK tools directly connect AI applications to Alation’s comprehensive catalog of organizational knowledge and governed data. This ensures that AI systems utilize data that is accurate, consistent, and trustworthy, eliminating data quality issues that often undermine AI effectiveness.

2. Generating credible and accurate AI outcomes

By providing AI applications direct access to standardized metadata and governed data sources through Alation, the SDK tools help produce AI-generated results that are credible and reliable. Users can confidently leverage these outputs to drive critical business decisions and maintain stakeholder trust.

3. Simplifying development and integration

The agent simplifies the process of developing and deploying AI-powered applications and agents by offering purpose-built tools and seamless interoperability with existing AI technologies. This streamlines workflows and significantly reduces the complexity and costs associated with custom integrations and development.

Additionally, the Alation AI Agent SDK supports Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) – more on this below!

Integration with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)

The AI landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with developers constantly seeking ways to simplify integrations and enhance the efficiency of AI-powered applications. One of the biggest challenges has been enabling AI systems to interact seamlessly with external data sources—without requiring extensive custom development. Enter Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), a game-changer in AI interoperability.

Introduced in November 2024, MCP is a standardized framework that allows AI models to communicate directly with third-party applications and data repositories. Think of it as a universal translator: instead of needing to build one-off integrations for each new system, developers can rely on MCP to bridge the gap between AI models and the external data they need. The Alation AI Agent SDK integrates with MCP, enabling AI development teams to easily incorporate Alation’s trusted, high-quality data into their applications and AI agents.

How does the Alation AI Agent SDK leverage MCP?

By integrating with MCP, the Alation AI Agent SDK empowers developers to connect AI-driven applications to governed enterprise data with minimal effort. This integration unlocks key benefits, including:

Seamless AI-data integration: MCP acts as a universal interface, allowing AI applications to retrieve metadata and query the enterprise data catalog without complex, custom-built connections.
Accelerated AI development: Developers no longer need to write specialized code for integrating Alation’s data catalog with various AI models. MCP standardizes how AI applications access external data, significantly reducing development time and effort.
Greater flexibility in AI tool selection: Because MCP enables interoperability across multiple AI models, organizations can easily experiment with different LLMs, switching providers as needed without losing access to governed enterprise data.
More reliable and trustworthy AI outputs: Since Alation provides governed, high-quality metadata and datasets, AI systems using the MCP-integrated SDK benefit from more accurate, contextually relevant insights—reducing the risks of AI hallucinations or misinformation.

With AI innovation accelerating, adopting open standards like MCP ensures that organizations can focus on deriving business value from AI rather than struggling with disconnected data sources and fragmented integrations. The combination of MCP’s standardized connectivity and Alation’s robust data governance framework makes it easier than ever to build AI solutions that are not only powerful but also trustworthy and enterprise-ready.

Conclusion

With the Alation AI Agent SDK, organizations can now power AI Applications and Agents with high-quality, trusted, and governed data in Alation to create smarter, trustworthy applications even faster.

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