Chat with Alation Analytics: Turn Conversations into Data Insights

Imagine transforming your organization’s everyday activity in Alation into instant, reliable insights — without writing a single line of SQL. That’s the power of Chat with Alation Analytics, a new feature that makes exploring Alation Analytics data as easy as asking a question. 

With this new capability, you can ask questions in plain English and get instant, governed answers from certified Alation Analytics data products. Every insight is powered by trusted metadata, ensuring transparent, accurate answers you can trust.

This new feature turns everyday Alation activity into clear, actionable intelligence—helping you measure adoption trends, reveal engagement patterns, and guide your data maturity journey. It’s data intelligence made conversational, accessible, and instantly valuable.

The challenge: Quantifying the ROI of your data investment

For many data leaders, demonstrating the ROI of a data program remains elusive. Metrics like “data culture,” “adoption,” or “governance maturity” sound strategic, yet they’re difficult to track and even harder to connect to business outcomes. Without clear visibility, it’s nearly impossible to prove the return on data initiatives—or to understand where investments are paying off.

At the same time, even simple, operational questions—like “Which tables are most popular in Alation Compose?” or “Which workflows are pending approval?”—often demand technical know-how or time-consuming collaboration with SQL experts. The result is friction between activity and insight, where even straightforward inquiries slow down decision-making and obscure visibility into data usage and value.

To close this gap, organizations need a way to quantify data program performance, translate technical activity into business impact, and democratize access to trustworthy insights. Only then can they prove the ROI of being data-driven—and continuously improve how data fuels better decisions.

The vision: Turn Alation activity into insight

By combining natural-language interaction with standardized, pre-built analytics products, Chat with Alation Analytics delivers conversational insights that are both intuitive and trustworthy. Ask questions like “Which tables lack descriptions?” or “Which workflows remain open?” and get accurate answers from certified analytics sources—so your teams can act confidently, consistently, and quickly.

To support this experience, Alation is developing a suite of out-of-the-box data products focused on key operational questions about catalog adoption, governance, and usage. These products will form the foundation of the Chat with Alation Analytics experience—enabling data teams to surface curation gaps, track quality metrics, and steer healthier data programs.

For example, you can ask:

• Which objects don’t have a steward assigned?

• Which tables are most frequently queried?

• Which popular tables include deprecated columns?

• How many inactive stewards are still assigned to objects?

These capabilities make data curation, tracking, and governance not just easier, but smarter—helping teams move from questions to clear, trusted insights in minutes, not days.

In future releases, you’ll also be able to instantly visualize these responses—transforming metadata into interactive, shareable charts. 

What’s Next

These capabilities are currently in development, and your feedback will help shape how this vision becomes reality. We invite our customers to share their perspectives, ideas, and use cases as we refine the conversational analytics experience. 

Our purpose has always been to empower a curious and rational world. With Chat with Alation Analytics, we’re taking another bold step toward that future — one where insight is as easy as asking a question, and where every conversation unlocks new understanding.

Curious to try the tool? Reach out to your account manager to sign up.