Many IT vendors claim to have an operating system for AI. At Alation, its proprietary AIOS revolves around a platform that unites data, business context, and agents. Following its launch in June, the offering will receive its first major upgrade, consisting of six components.
Alation points out that the lack of context and data dictates how models operate. Data alone is not enough for agents to behave the way organizations want them to. A striking finding from Grant Thornton’s AI Impact Survey, cited by Alation, is that 78 percent of 950 C-suite decision-makers believe they would not pass an independent AI governance audit unscathed within 90 days. That figure needed to come down drastically, and Alation sees an opportunity for AIOS to address this need.
AI governance
Lineage tracing is the capability behind the new AI governance feature, now available within Alation’s AIOS. Connectors with Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft, and Amazon provide clear insight into the origin and movement of data. Console, also now available, serves as a roadmap for user queries, in other words, a chat solution similar to Ask Oracle or Databricks Genie.
The other four new features will first be released in early access. The first is Governed Collections, a feature that makes unstructured data available to agents when needed. Think of compliance regulations, details regarding an upcoming audit, or a client’s standard operating procedures; making this information available to AI can save a lot of work, ensuring that a proposed document already meets certain requirements.
Intelligent data delivery
Intelligent Feeds is the name for a series of metrics, visualizations, and “narratives” that dynamically provide information to users, ideally before they have to request it themselves. Ontologies give agents a way to capture, in machine-readable language, how a company operates. Finally, Semantic Model Mastering is a data ingestion tool in which semantic models from Snowflake or Databricks pass information to Alation for governance. This is intended to keep data manageable and prevent information from being duplicated or two different types of data that interact with each other from using the same definitions.
The six new features are included in Alation AIOS; it is not yet known when the early access features will reach general availability (GA).
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