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The enterprise data catalog market has undergone dramatic shifts in the modern gen AI era.
Traditional data catalogs served as static repositories where users searched for datasets and documentation. The market expanded to include data governance capabilities with many vendors branding the technology as data intelligence platforms.
Early AI enhancements to data catalog implementations promised to revolutionize data access, but often delivered inconsistent results that enterprises couldn’t trust for critical decisions.
Now, a new generation of metadata-aware AI agents promises to bridge this gap, maintaining business context across conversations and provide the accuracy levels enterprises demand.
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Alation, which is one of the largest independent data intelligence platform vendors and claims 40% of the Fortune 100 as its customers, has been steadily expanding its AI capabilities as the need for data has changed.
Today the company announced its latest set of AI capabilities with an enhanced data query capability it calls ‘Chat with Your Data’ that claims to improve answer accuracy by up to 30%.
The transformation of the data catalog market reflects a fundamental shift in enterprise expectations. Organizations no longer want separate systems for data discovery, governance and analysis. They demand unified platforms that democratize data access while maintaining the precision required for business-critical decisions.
“I think generative AI impacts the work of data management and also impacts the importance of data management and building applications,” Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation told VentureBeat.
Traditional data catalogs operated on a destination model. Users navigated to the platform, searched for information and browsed through results. This approach worked when data teams served as intermediaries between business users and data systems.
“Previously, Alation has been sold to primarily data management professionals,” Sangani said. “Increasingly, we’re finding CIOs, CTOs and CPOs who are building technology and who are trying to roll technology out, are leveraging Alation in order to be able to build agents and simultaneously make sure that those agents are appropriately governed and managed.”
Simply put, business users wanted direct access to data without technical expertise or analyst intervention. Those types of users just want to get the data they need and the right answers without worrying about the complexity of the underlying data platforms, which is where AI makes a big difference.
“I think the world has been turned upside d …