Alation and Salesforce partner on data governance for Data Cloud

Alation also uses its own AI, dubbed Allie, to provide AI-assisted curation and intelligent search within Data Cloud, and to assist it in developing connectors to other data sources. When it imports the physical representation of a dataset, it also pulls in additional information such as logs and documentation to describe and contextualize the data.

“We look at the entire landscape of information that an enterprise has,” Sangani said. “As we do that, we’re learning constantly, and that learning allows us to take what otherwise a standard LLM might not know, and then season it with information that is specific to that enterprise so that we can translate their technical speak into something that is understandable.” That work takes a lot of machine learning and AI to accomplish.

Alation also works with structured and semi-structured data, as well as some unstructured data living inside of file stores, Sangani said, and will leverage what metadata it can find, but it does not, for example, go into video files and generate metadata about their contents.