Alation Data Products Builder: Create AI-Ready Data Products in Minutes

Every day, data teams face growing demand: business users want insights faster, and AI projects require business context to deliver precise, trusted results. Yet even with better visibility into data, core challenges persist. Teams spend valuable time handling repetitive requests. Analysts can’t always trust the answers they get. And AI initiatives often stall without a reliable, AI-ready foundation.

For many, the frustration sounds like this:

• “We can’t deliver at scale—requests just keep piling up.”

• “I can’t trust the insights without double-checking the data.”

• “Our AI projects stall because the foundation isn’t trustworthy.”

These challenges share a common root: data isn’t packaged in a way that’s consumable and trustworthy at scale. That’s why organizations are turning to data productization.

Data products are packaged data with purpose, context, and policies. They’re immediately usable by both humans and AI systems, providing the trust, context, and interoperability needed to scale analytics and enable autonomous agents.

Roadblocks to scaling data products

We polled 260 Alation customers to learn about their biggest challenges when it comes to building and scaling data products:

• 34% cited quality and governance as their concern.

• 26% pointed to adoption across teams.

• 25% struggled with clarity on business use cases.

• 15% lacked the skills or resources to keep up.

The message is clear: To succeed, organizations must first anchor to a clear business use case, but it only scales when data products are governed, trusted, adopted, and continuously improved.

Introducing the Alation Data Products Builder

This is where the Alation Data Products Builder comes in. Designed for data stewards and producers, the Data Products Builder provides a co-pilot-like experience that automates the heavy lifting of packaging, documenting, and validating data. It makes creating AI-ready data products fast, intuitive, and reliable, so teams can spend less time on mechanics and more time on impact.

It delivers on this promise through three core pillars:

1. Accelerate creation

Traditional data product creation has been slow and manual. The Data Products Builder changes this by leveraging catalog metadata and natural language prompts. Stewards can ask the co-pilot to assemble assets, generate descriptions, and add business context, while the system highlights gaps and suggests fixes. What once took weeks can now be done in minutes, turning data product creation into a fast and iterative process.

2. Ensure trust

Speed only matters if users can trust the results. Every product is validated against Marketplace standards before publishing. Governance checks, certification, and interoperability requirements are built in, ensuring products are reliable from the start. Teams can then publish directly to the Alation Data Products Marketplace or export a YAML file to share and reuse elsewhere.

3. Drive adoption

A data product’s true value comes when it is widely used. The Data Products Builder makes this possible by enabling continuous improvement—definitions can be updated, new tables added, and business feedback incorporated with ease. Products published into the Marketplace are certified and discoverable, giving business users confidence. And because products are AI-ready, they can be consumed not just by humans but also by AI agents, fueling adoption at scale. That’s how products become living assets—used, trusted, and recognized across teams.

Elevating data teams into strategic builders

The real story of the Alation Data Products Builder goes beyond faster creation. Its greatest impact is in how it elevates the role of data producers and stewards—transforming them into strategic builders who maintain, refine, and scale AI-ready data products over time.

Automation removes the repetitive lift, but it’s the human expertise that ensures products remain relevant and impactful. Data product managers act as translators between technical assets and business outcomes, guiding products through continuous improvement. They:

• Maintain and evolve products by refining definitions, incorporating business feedback, and adding new tables or sources as needs grow.

• Clarify use cases and KPIs in collaboration with stakeholders, ensuring every product ties directly to measurable outcomes.

• Drive trust and adoption by certifying products, iterating on improvements, and scaling usage across teams.

In this new world, data teams aren’t simply maintaining static assets—they are curating living, AI-ready data products. These products serve as the connective tissue between people, processes, and AI agents, enabling smarter decisions across the business.

The Data Products Builder and the Marketplace

The Data Products Builder is part of the Alation Data Products Marketplace, where organizations can build, use, and trust AI-ready data products at scale. The Marketplace delivers three promises:

• Build with ease through the Data Products Builder.

• Get answers fast by chatting with data products in plain English.

• Enforce standards at scale with certification for governance, quality, and compliance.

Together, the Data Products Builder and Marketplace provide one integrated experience. The Data Products Builder turns data into governed, AI-ready products for business users and AI systems — faster, easier, and at scale. The Marketplace ensures those products are discoverable and reusable across teams. 

Organizations no longer compete on who has more data, but on who can create trusted, governed, AI-ready data products that deliver outcomes at scale.

The Alation Data Products Builder makes this possible. It accelerates creation, ensures trust, and drives adoption. It elevates data teams from fulfilling requests to shaping the knowledge layer that fuels both people and AI.

The message is clear and lasting: the future belongs to those who treat data as a product. With Alation, that future is no longer aspirational—it’s something data teams can build today.

Start building AI-ready data products today

Now is the time to experience the Alation Data Products Builder for yourself. With a co-pilot-like experience, you can generate certified, AI-ready data products in minutes, then publish them directly into the Alation Data Products Marketplace or export them for use in your own workflows.

Start building your first AI-ready data product today.

Join "Build Valuable Data Products Faster with Alation’s Marketplace" at revAlation 2025 to see how to turn data into trusted products that deliver business value.