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April 11, 2024

Collibra Launches AI Governance at Data Citizens Conference

(Photon photo/Shutterstock)

The Collibra community descended upon Orlando, Florida, this week for the company’s annual Data Citizens conference. In addition to educational sessions and keynotes on the importance of data intelligence, attendees got their first glimpse of Collibra AI Governance, the company’s latest product, which is aimed at helping customers get more control over the AI models they put into production.

Companies around the world are rushing to develop AI solutions to improve their operations in a variety of ways. Generative AI, in particular, has caught the attention of executives and board members who perceive that competitive advantage is at stake. Hundreds of billions are flowing into AI development and AI startups.

But rollout of AI applications into production has been slower than expected, in part due to uncertainty about how the AI models are working and the business risks that uncertain models can bring with regards to bias, inaccuracies, legal, and ethical concerns. New regulations, such as European Commission’s AI Act, will soon put penalties on the board for companies that deploy AI recklessly.

Collibra is moving to address these concerns with AI Governance, the latest component of its Data Intelligence Platform. First revealed in February and now generally available, AI Governance is designed to minimize the risk of adoption AI and maximize the return on investment by increasing visibility into how the AI models work, and automating governance workflows that surround them.

Collibra AI Governance monitors AI models to lower risks (Image courtesy Collibra)

As a part of Collibra’s Data Intelligence Platform, AI Governance enables customers to manage AI models alongside the controls they use to manage and govern data. Collibra got its start as a data catalog provider before broadening out into wider data governance initiatives, and the company sees lots of value in governing AI models within the context of the data that is used to train them.

To that end, Data Intelligence integrates directly with the Collibra data catalog, as well as the data security and privacy components of the Data Intelligence suite, which will help to ensure that data used to train AI models isn’t violating data security or privacy guidelines. This allows Collibra and its customers to control access to data, in particularly personally identifiable information (PII).

Beyond the technical controls, AI Governance provides a place for a data science or AI development team to share ideas on AI applications, define the use cases, and document important details about them, such as the goals, business values, and roles associated with the AI models. By registering the ideas and tracking the development of AI models alongside the data that will be used to train them, AI Governance enables customers to start building their own AI catalog.

As the models are developed, AI Governance documents the relative risks involved with the AI application, including the risks to privacy, intellectual property, ethics, and compliance. The software provides a dashboard to provide executives and legal teams with descriptions of the risks and how they relate to applicable policies.

AI Governance provides a place to monitor and track the training of AI models over time, including accuracy rates and other metrics. This gives customers a way to determine how the model is changing as it moves from training to production.

In addition to announcing the GA of AI Governance, Collibra also announced the launch of Collibra AI, a set of new generative AI features for automating some data quality and governance tasks within the Data Intelligence Platform.

Collibra AI will enable customers to automatically generate SQL-based data quality rules from natural language using large language models (LLMs). It will also help with data curation by leveraging LLM’s language generation capacities to automate the description of data assets.

This pair of announcements–Collibra AI and AI Governance–represent Collibra’s biggest investment in GenAI and LLMs to date.

“With the general availability of Collibra AI Governance and the announcement of Collibra AI, we’re committed to making the work of data teams faster and more efficient by leveraging the power of AI,” Collibra Chief Product Officer Laura Sellers said in a press release. “By ensuring all data can be trusted, data leaders can reduce the risks of using AI and instead use it to drive responsible innovation within their organizations.”

Collibra also announced a major overhaul to the look and feel of its flagship data catalog product and its Data Intelligence Platform. The company also announced the launch of Collibra Data Notebook, which gives customers a SQL-based method for extracting information from the Collibra platform.

The Collibra Data Notebook builds on the company’s acquisition last September of Husprey, which developed a SQL notebook offering. Collibra leveraged that investment to launch the new SQL notebook that’s fully integrated with its data catalog and data governance solutions.

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