Data intelligence company Alation Inc. today announced the launch of Alation Chat with Your Data, a new offering aimed at allowing anyone in the enterprise to get fast, accurate numbers from structured data by asking questions in plain English.

The new solution is designed to make trusted insights accessible to all employees, without the need for analytics or engineering expertise. Alation’s metadata-aware agents use business definitions, context and lineage to reason through each response, unlike standalone solutions, with the result improving accuracy by up to 60%.

Alation Chat with Your Data is seeking to address the issue of employees spending too much time hunting for data, whether searching dashboards, chasing down analysts or interpreting inconsistent metrics. With the new service, instead of wasting time looking for information, employees can use it to solve real business problems and allow for faster decisions, better outcomes and stronger business performance, according to the company.

Under the hood of Alation Chat with Your Data is a query agent designed for structured data. Alation argues that with many existing artificial intelligence tools, metadata context such as business definitions or data lineage, gets lost between questions, leading to inconsistent answers. For example, a generic tool might forget a company’s annual recurring revenue definition after the first query, whereas the Alation query agent is context-aware and draws on a “knowledge layer” of curated data products and the full metadata in the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to keep every conversation aligned with your business context.

Alation Chat with Your Data is built to work with any data system and offers an open, flexible architecture free from vendor lock-in. The solution queries data directly where it resides, as opposed to requiring all data to be moved into their own environment, so there is no need to copy or migrate it into the Alation platform.

“By helping more people ask better questions and trust the answers, we’re making data-driven thinking part of everyday work,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Satyen Sangani. “Instead of digging through dashboards or waiting for analysts, users can simply ask a question and get a clear, trustworthy answer in seconds.”

Alation was previously in the news in May when it acquired Numbers Station Inc., a startup that’s building AI agents for data workflows, for an undisclosed sum. Alation Chat with Your Data was built on technology from the acquisition, combining features from Numbers Station and Alation’s existing offerings.

Photo: Alation