“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.
While Alation offers the governance for the data within Data Cloud, for its part, Sangani said, “I think Salesforce recognizes that they need an ecosystem to make Data Cloud successful. Broadly defined, if you’re going to try to build a data storage environment, people and enterprises are going to need to trust the information inside of that environment.”
