How Alation's Agentic Knowledge Layer Makes Snowflake Intelligence More Accurate

The enterprise data landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As AI becomes central to business operations, the role of data management is evolving from cataloging and governance to data products and agents —where metadata, context, and semantic understanding become the foundation for accurate AI outputs.

This shift is evident in Alation's latest suite innovations, which represent a new paradigm where data management actively powers AI accuracy rather than simply organizing information. The challenge? AI models, particularly LLMs, excel at processing unstructured text but struggle with the structured data that drives most enterprise decisions. Without understanding schemas, joins, business metrics, and relationships, even sophisticated AI can generate hallucinations and unreliable insights.  Confident and incorrect doesn’t work when you want accurate information.

The solution lies in grounding AI in rich, contextual metadata, which has been shown to improve the accuracy of AI outputs by 30-60%. In this blog, we’ll reveal how Alation enables the accuracy and ultimate success of Snowflake’s latest AI tool.

What is Snowflake Intelligence?

Snowflake Intelligence represents an advancement in making enterprise data more accessible through AI-powered interfaces and chat interactions. This new capability within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud enables organizations to query and analyze data conversationally, lowering technical barriers and bringing insights to a broader range of enterprise users.

The effectiveness of these AI-powered capabilities, however, depends critically on the quality and completeness of the underlying metadata. AI models need context—semantic definitions, data lineage, business logic, and governance policies—to deliver accurate, reliable results. Without this foundation, queries can produce answers that sound plausible but miss critical nuances, reference deprecated data, or violate business rules.

This is where Alation becomes essential. As a launch partner for Snowflake Intelligence, Alation provides the metadata infrastructure and contextual intelligence that enables these AI capabilities to deliver truly trustworthy insights.

Where Alation fits: The foundation for trusted AI

While Snowflake Intelligence makes data conversational and accessible, Alation's Agentic Data Intelligence Platform ensures those conversations produce accurate, contextualized, and trustworthy results.

At the heart of Alation's platform is the Agentic Knowledge Layer—a unified, metadata-driven foundation that enables AI agents to access, understand, and act on enterprise data with precision and trust.

Understanding the Agentic Knowledge Layer

Unlike traditional data catalogs or analytics tools, the Agentic Knowledge Layer (AKL) is purpose-built to power AI agents. It combines data governance, metadata from the data catalog, curated data products, and AI prompts, tools, and inputs into a system designed to give humans and AI models alike the context they need for accurate analysis.  

Enterprise LLMs lack inherent awareness of database schemas, table joins, calculated metrics, and data relationships. This blind spot creates risks, leading to inaccurate guidance and unreliable analytics that can undermine business decisions.

The AKL fills this gap by grounding AI in contextual metadata, ensuring that AI agents and natural language interfaces deliver accurate, compliant, production-ready insights instead of misleading approximations. In testing by the Numbers Station team, enterprise AI grounded in metadata shows a 60% improvement in Text2SQL accuracy compared to models operating without this context.

Simply put, without a knowledge layer, enterprise AI may sound authoritative but often falls short. With it, AI becomes reliable, explainable, and aligned to the business context.

The Alation advantage

Through the AKL and active metadata management, Alation brings to Snowflake Intelligence:

• Context-rich discovery: Users can instantly understand what data means, where it comes from, and how it's used—critical context for formulating accurate natural language queries.

• Lineage, policies, and trust scoring: Every insight is grounded in governed, high-quality data with transparent provenance and compliance validation.

• Crowdsourced collaboration: Human and AI agents learn from shared context, continuously improving data fidelity and business understanding.

• Embedded governance and scoring: AI outputs and analytics are built on reliable, bias-aware data that meets enterprise standards.

In essence, Alation provides the trusted knowledge layer that strengthens Snowflake Intelligence—transforming AI outputs from plausible-sounding answers into precise, explainable, and actionable business insights.

Doesn’t Alation have Intelligent Agents too?

Yes – and this is where our philosophy becomes clear.

We see agents and evaluations as critically intertwined with metadata. After all, AI agents are only as good as the knowledge they can access and the context they understand. That's why we've built intelligent capabilities directly into our platform.

But here’s what sets us apart: we're not prescriptive about how you deploy AI.  We’re open by design.

Whether you're using Snowflake Intelligence, building custom agents, or leveraging Alation's own AI capabilities, the principle remains the same—your agents need a trusted foundation. The Agentic Knowledge Layer provides that solid ground regardless of which tools sit on top of it.

With Alation, you have a single place to govern and manage your prompts, model selections, and AI behaviors. We treat prompts and model configurations as critical knowledge assets. Just like your data definitions and business logic, your AI instructions need versioning, governance, and collaborative refinement.

This approach gives you flexibility without fragmentation. Use our agents, use partner agents, build your own—the AKL ensures they all operate from the same trusted knowledge base, maintaining consistency, accuracy, and compliance across your entire AI ecosystem.

As AI evolves from experimental to operational, enterprises need more than powerful models and conversational interfaces. They need a foundation of trusted data, comprehensive governance, and rich contextual understanding.

With Alation's Agentic Knowledge Layer powering Snowflake Intelligence, that foundation is here—enabling organizations to move from insights to intelligent action with confidence and accuracy.

This collaboration represents a new chapter in enterprise AI—one where technology doesn't just automate or answer questions, but truly understands your data, your business, and your governance requirements. Together, Alation and Snowflake Intelligence empower enterprises to harness AI's full potential while maintaining the trust and accuracy that enterprise decisions demand.

Learn more about Alation's AI capabilities:

• Chat with Your Enterprise Data

• Documentation Agent

• Data Quality Agent

• Data Products Builder Agent

• Agent Builder

• AI Agent SDK