LONDON, May 12, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced the launch of its Data Products Builder Agent, an AI-powered tool that helps data teams turn messy, raw data into trusted, reusable data products. It removes the busywork of data teams, enabling them to deliver the data products that business users and AI need.
Today’s business users demand faster access to trusted data. Yet, enterprise data teams struggle with a deluge of under-documented data and backlogs of duplicate requests from analyst teams. These organizations are overwhelmed, making it difficult to identify what data is valuable and ready for use. Now, with the rise of AI initiatives, data teams are also under increasing pressure to deliver data fit for not only human, but machine consumption as well.
The Data Products Builder Agent addresses these challenges by transforming raw data into productized, AI-ready assets that are easy to find and use in the Alation Data Products Marketplace. By automating the data product lifecycle, the Data Products Agent streamlines curation, packaging, and publishing processes. Based on user prompting, the agent identifies the right data to answer the user’s business question. It then auto-generates and documents the data product design specification and ensures data products meet marketplace and governance standards, all while keeping a human in the loop. This enables data teams to focus on strategic work while empowering the business with trusted, ready-to-use data products.
Alation is the most open and extensible agentic data intelligence platform and is committed to providing customers with continued independence and interoperability of metadata. Alation-built data products are governed and machine-readable across any platform. The Alation Data Product definitions build on the Open Data Products Specification (ODPS), a YAML-based standard that enables open, portable, and extensible metadata for data products. Alation has also joined the Open Data Product Technical Steering Committee (TSC), furthering its support and commitment to help partners unlock the full potential of their data in an open and interoperable manner.
“Alation’s decision to join ODPS is a significant milestone in advancing the standardization of data products. As the leader in data intelligence, Alation brings deep expertise and practical insight that will further strengthen our mission to build open, interoperable, business-ready data ecosystems,” said Jarkko Moilanen, Founder of ODPS. “We are excited to partner with Alation and welcome them to the ODPS Technical Steering Committee, where together we can help drive the development, direction, and innovation of ODPS.”
“AI will soon be the primary consumer of data. Organizations that invest in building AI-ready reusable data products will get massive leverage as AI tooling takes off,” said Jake Magner, Sr. Director, Product Management, Alation. “The biggest challenge with building data products is the time and cost of ownership, and even knowing how to make them AI-ready. The Data Products Builder agent helps solve this problem.”
Unlike legacy catalogs or manual workflows, Alation offers co-pilot editing, intelligent recommendations, and a governed data marketplace, all powered by real usage signals. These capabilities help data teams deliver trusted, reusable data products faster and at scale.
Key capabilities of the Alation Data Products Builder Agent include:
- Effortless data product creation: Automate and accelerate the creation of trusted, high-value data products with AI-powered intelligent recommendations for data products based on user-defined use cases and popular data assets, leveraging active metadata.
- Built-in trust: Scale data product management with built-in governance, data contracts, defined owners, certification, and reusability, while ensuring open interoperability.
- Business-aligned relevance: Drive adoption and value by aligning data products with business and AI-demand based on data asset usage, dependencies, and value attribution. Products are published to the Alation Data Products Marketplace, enabling discoverability by data product consumers: humans and AI agents. Dashboards for data product managers and stewards track usage and feedback, helping teams iterate and continuously improve data offerings.
The release of the Data Products Builder Agent, which will be generally available in Q3 2025, follows the company’s recent announcement of its Agentic Data Intelligence Platform and agents that automate and guide data discovery, governance, and compliance, including the Documentation Agent, Data Quality (DQ) Agent, and AI Agent SDK.
Learn More:
- Today, the BBC, an Alation customer, will take the stage at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2025 in a session titled, “Building the Digital First BBC by Transforming into a Data Product Organization.” The BBC is on a Digital First mission and transforming into a data product organization. The session, which features the BBC’s Head of Data & AI Governance, Nathalie Berdat, will explore how the company’s data strategy is driving a cultural and organizational shift that is evolving its data architecture and embedding data capabilities company-wide. Click here to learn more about the session and visit Alation at booth #319.
- Register for the webinar, “What is a Data Product—and How Do You Build One?” on May 22, 2025. The webinar will discuss how to build data products that deliver business value and feature insights from Dr. Jarkko Moilanen, Founder, ODPS, Jake Magner, Product Leader at Alation, and David Chao, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Alation.
About Alation
Alation is the data intelligence company. More than 600 global enterprises — including 40% of the Fortune 100 — rely on Alation to realize value from their data and AI initiatives. Customers such as Cisco, DocuSign, Nasdaq, Pfizer, and Samsung trust Alation’s platform for self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI-ready data, fostering data-driven innovation at scale. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Alation has been recognized five times by Inc. Magazine as one of the Best Workplaces. To learn more, visit http://www.alation.com.
