Introducing Alation Chat with Your Data—Accurate, Transparent, Governed Answers

For over a decade, Alation has been on a mission to connect people to the data they need to make better decisions. That journey began with the data catalog, and it has continued into a full platform for enterprise data intelligence. Today, we’re excited to announce our next step forward: Chat with Your Data.

This isn’t just another chat interface—it’s a metadata-aware AI assistant that lets you ask questions in plain language and receive trusted, explainable answers:

To our existing customers who’ve already published data products—and to prospects intrigued by what that means—Chat with Your Data will elevate your capabilities for data-driven decision-making and democratize insights for non-technical users alike.

These answers aren’t just AI’s best guess—they are grounded in governed data products built on your organization’s metadata, boosting answer accuracy by up to 60% compared to generic AI tools that do not have access to metadata (as seen in benchmark testing with Numbers Station customers).

This launch also represents a milestone for Alation: our first product integration since acquiring Numbers Station. By merging Alation’s metadata-rich foundation with Numbers Station’s advanced agentic AI, we’re enabling a powerful way to put governance into action—immediately.

Chris Aberger, CEO of Numbers Station, captured the shared vision perfectly:

“With Alation, we’re realizing a shared vision: making AI useful by grounding it in structured metadata and enterprise context. This integration turns the promise of generative AI into real, explainable action for business and data teams alike.”

Why now?

In today’s landscape, the rise of ChatGPT and enterprise-scale AI has fueled expectations for solving complex challenges. Yet business users still struggle to get answers fast: they navigate dashboards, juggle tools, or wait on data teams—who are overwhelmed by repetitive requests.

At the same time, everyone wants to bring AI into the enterprise. But how do you do that responsibly—without losing trust, control, or auditability?

That’s where Chat with Your Data comes in.

Running on top of Alation’s data products, and powered by a multi-agent architecture that understands your business context, its metadata-aware agents query only from governed data products published in your Data Products Marketplace. Every answer is secure, consistent, and compliant by design.

Measurable accuracy that’s transparent 

Accuracy isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the foundation for trust in AI. Too often, generic AI tools hallucinate answers, misinterpret metrics, or pull from the wrong datasets, leading to costly mistakes.

Chat with Your Data changes that. By anchoring every query to governed data products enriched with your business’s metadata, it eliminates guesswork. The result? Answers that are up to 60% more accurate than those from generic AI tools that don’t use metadata. And every step is fully transparent—you can see exactly which datasets, joins, and definitions were used, making it easy to verify and trust the result.

Better yet, accuracy improves over time. Through feedback loops, data admins can review and refine responses, helping the model learn from each interaction. With every question asked, the system gets smarter, faster, and even more aligned with your business context.

With accuracy this high, transparency built in, and continuous improvement baked into the process, business leaders can make decisions confidently, and data teams can spend less time double-checking AI outputs and more time driving strategy.

From searching to solving: Activating your governance

If you’re already an Alation customer: you’ve done the hard work of publishing data products and enforcing governance. Chat with Your Data doesn’t replace that—it activates it.

If you’re a prospect: data products are certified, reusable packages of governed data that simplify access and insight—and Chat with Your Data is the bridge that turns that metadata into actionable conversation.

Instead of answering the same questions again and again, data teams can now scale trust and insight across the business. No more redundant queries. No more hand-holding. Just AI that works as rigorously as you designed it to.

Imagine asking questions for any line of business: “Which campaigns drove closed deals last quarter?”, “What percent of products were delivered on time and in full last week?”, or "Why is profit so low? — instead of navigating a maze of interfaces, you just ask.

At the core of Alation Chat with Your Data is a powerful query agent designed for structured data. The Alation query agent is context-aware, drawing on a “knowledge layer” of curated data products and the full metadata in the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to keep every conversation accurate and aligned with your business context.

Built for enterprise, trusted by design

Chat with Your Data is enterprise-grade, supporting fine-grained access controls that enforce existing permissions. Whether you're querying sensitive financial data or personal information, the platform ensures that only the right people see the right data—automatically aligned with your governance and compliance policies. Customers need more than speed to trust AI—they need confidence. That’s why our approach goes beyond hype. Chat with Your Data delivers answers grounded in metadata. Every response is traceable, governance is enforced automatically, and the platform flexes to your policies and technology stack—whether you need to work across databases, swap models, or plug into tools like Tableau. It’s a federated approach to enterprise AI—one that makes trust the default, not a caveat.

Real results in the enterprise

With Chat with Your Data, organizations can ask questions in plain language, get answers faster, and trust that every response meets their standards for accuracy, security, and compliance. At Euromonitor, the results are already clear:

“At Euromonitor, our data empowers companies to shape critical decisions in markets around the world. By integrating ‘Chat with Your Data’ into our Passport AI platform, we are making it easier than ever for our clients to interrogate that data. They can now uncover strategic insights on local and global trends through simple conversation, all while maintaining the trust, accuracy, and control they expect from us.”

— Lamine Lahouasnia, Director of Gen AI, Euromonitor

Try it on your data products today

Now is the time to experience this for yourself—on your own governed data products. This new capability is available wherever you work in Alation—invoked directly in Alation Anywhere, surfaced through the Data Products Marketplace, or integrated into your own workflows via APIs and SDKs.

Trusted answers are just one question away.

Start exploring Chat with Your Data today.