Alation Unveils AI Governance Solution to Power Safe and Reliable AI for Enterprises

Redwood City, Calif. – October 9, 2024 – Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today launched its AI Governance solution to help organizations realize value from their data and AI initiatives. The solution ensures that AI models are developed using secure, compliant, and well-documented data. With capabilities such as lineage for AI auditability, AI documentation, data discovery and custom tagging, and data quality flags, organizations can confidently accelerate AI development, mitigate risks, and optimize their AI investments for business impact.

As regulatory demands rise and data environments grow more complex, organizations struggle to scale AI applications—including machine learning (ML) and generative AI (GenAI)—beyond proof-of-concept stages. Despite growing adoption, research from McKinsey shows only 11% of organizations have successfully scaled these initiatives, largely due to challenges in data governance, compliance, and security.¹ New and evolving regulations, such as GDPR, the EU AI Act, and frameworks like the OECD AI Principles and NIST AI Risk Management Framework, further complicate governance requirements.

Alation’s AI Governance solution equips organizations with trusted, compliant data and the visibility to confidently scale AI initiatives while adhering to governance policies. By cataloging training datasets, LLM prompts, AI models, and API endpoints in a unified platform, Alation ensures traceability across the AI ecosystem, enabling compliance and fostering collaboration. This transparency mitigates AI risks by allowing teams to trace errors, correct biases, and maintain accountability throughout the AI lifecycle. With curated features ensuring data quality and best practices like model card documentation, Alation streamlines AI development, accelerates time-to-value, and delivers governed collaborative AI outcomes. By reinforcing trust and explainability, Alation helps enterprises future-proof and centralize their AI efforts, driving measurable impact.

“Alation is critical to increasing the confidence and the value of our data, providing a single source of truth that drives informed decision-making across the organization," said Ilya Gilin, Leader of Data and AI/ML Governance at Interac. "As we scale our AI initiatives, Alation delivers the transparency, traceability, and governance needed to build, document, and validate analytical models confidently. With features like data quality flags and lineage for AI auditability, we can ensure our model inventory is accurate and timely while maintaining compliance and operational excellence. By transforming data into a strategic asset, Alation fuels innovation and future-proofs our data governance program."

“Alation delivers critical guardrails required to help keep AI initiatives safe, ethical, and compliant,” said Stewart Bond, Vice President of Data Intelligence and Integration Software Research at IDC. “Alation helps enterprises find, understand, and trust their data and now brings this expertise to AI—now a top boardroom priority. Alation’s AI Governance solution equips data and business teams to track and validate data before it feeds into AI models while supporting model development, documentation, and validation. By providing a trusted platform, Alation enables organizations to deploy and scale reliable, auditable AI, ensuring compliance, mitigating risks, and driving measurable, AI-driven business outcomes.”

“The potential for AI to revolutionize industries—from preventing financial fraud to accelerating drug development—is immense, but realizing that potential and driving true business value depends on trusted, high-quality data,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation. “Alation’s AI Governance solution ensures AI initiatives are built on secure, compliant, and transparent data, enabling faster innovation with confidence. As enterprises continue to invest in AI infrastructure to scale large models, Alation turns those investments into real-world applications that deliver measurable ROI, reduce risk, and scale AI safely and ethically—unlocking significant business value.”

Alation’s AI Governance solution enables organizations to confidently scale AI initiatives and drive measurable business outcomes by leveraging:

• Accurate Datasets for Trusted Models: Alation equips data scientists, ML experts, and AI engineers with trusted, compliant, contextual data. By leveraging Alation’s Intelligent Search and custom tags, users can quickly locate and tag relevant and compliant datasets needed to build trusted AI models, ensuring a strong foundation for AI initiatives.

• Streamlined AI Documentation and Collaboration: Alation provides a single source of truth for documenting and managing AI models using model card templates. By centralizing collaboration within the AI Governance solution, teams can collaborate in the context of specific models, ensuring unified visibility across all stakeholders. This promotes governance, compliance, and the efficient discovery and sharing of AI/ML models across the enterprise, driving operational efficiency and transparency.

• Auditable AI Lineage and Traceability: Alation delivers end-to-end lineage from datasets to AI models, offering full visibility into the AI lifecycle. By cataloging training datasets, LLM prompts, AI models, and output data in a single source of truth, Alation ensures traceability for internal stakeholders and auditors. This enables organizations to diagnose issues, enforce compliance, and maintain trust in AI systems, embedding safety, ethics, and governance throughout the entire process.

• Compliance and Risk Mitigation: Alation’s AI and data governance framework flags non-compliant datasets and ensures AI models are built on reliable, governed data. This mitigates operational risks, prevents costly errors, and safeguards data integrity—ensuring organizations meet the highest regulatory standards while driving innovation.

• AI Readiness Accelerator: Alation’s Expert Services offering accelerates AI adoption by providing expert guidance and best practices for model card development. Customers can also engage system integrators from the Alation ecosystem to implement these practices, ensuring they are prepared to scale AI initiatives and deliver measurable business impact. 

To learn more, read our blog, AI Governance Best Practices: A Framework for Data Leaders. 

Register for the webinar, "Building Trust in AI: Best Practices for AI Governance from IDC's Stewart Bond," on October 23, 2024, at 8 AM PT. Gain expert insights from Stewart Bond, IDC’s Vice President of Data Intelligence and Integration Software Research, and David Chao, CMO of Alation, on navigating AI governance challenges, improving AI safety, and harnessing trusted data to drive successful AI initiatives.

^{1. McKinsey & Company, "Moving Past Gen AI's Honeymoon Phase: Seven Hard Truths for CIOs to Get from Pilot to Scale," May 13, 2024}