Redwood City, CA, April 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Alation Inc., the knowledge layer empowering enterprises to achieve business outcomes, today announced the appointment of Rick Baker as Chief Operating Officer (COO). In this role, Baker will lead Alation’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy and oversee Sales, GTM, Customer Operations, and Customer Solutions to scale the company’s global growth and drive maximum customer impact. As COO, he will bring together critical revenue and customer-facing functions under a unified operating model.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Rick to the executive team,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation. “Our goal is to help enterprises directly address challenges they face today when implementing AI agents to drive business outcomes. Rick’s experience building high-performing teams and scaling go-to-market operations will be instrumental as we continue to work hand-in-hand with customers on their AI journey.”
AI agents can only scale if they operate on precise, well-governed knowledge. They need context about an organization’s data and processes, and a continuous feedback loop that improves their accuracy with every interaction, across any platform, model, or application. Alation delivers this through the Knowledge Layer, enabling enterprises to drive real business outcomes from AI while retaining ownership of their enterprise knowledge. Baker’s appointment as COO marks an important step in that mission.
“I’m excited to join Alation at such a pivotal moment in its journey,” said Baker. “Alation pioneered the data catalog category and has led the market to where it is today, and there’s tremendous opportunity ahead. As enterprises seek to unlock greater value from their data and AI investments, Alation is ideally positioned to deliver meaningful business impact. I look forward to accelerating the company’s go-to-market strategy and driving long-term value for industry-leading organizations worldwide.”
Baker brings more than two decades of leadership experience across disruptive and emerging technologies, including automation, IoT, and AI. Widely recognized for his ability to architect scalable GTM sales organizations and build world-class teams that drive sustained growth, Baker will advance Alation’s mission to create an agentic knowledge layer that empowers enterprises to drive business outcomes and achieve true value from AI.
The appointment of Baker as COO comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of the general availability of Alation Curation Automation, which automates metadata governance at scale. The solution is a key component of Alation’s outcome-based governance system, a revolutionary approach to data governance that replaces manual, process-driven programs with an agent-powered operating system. Outcome-based governance enables organizations to govern by intent rather than by process. Teams declare the business outcome they need to achieve — regulatory compliance, AI readiness, or trusted data products — and the system automatically interprets, enforces, and maintains those standards through purpose-built agents and continuous automation.
To learn more about Alation, please visit https://www.alation.com/.
About Alation
Alation delivers an agentic knowledge layer that enables enterprises to achieve business outcomes and grow their most critical asset, knowledge. Global enterprises, including hundreds of Fortune 5000 companies, and organizations like AbbVie, American Family, Cisco, Finnair, Nasdaq, and Sallie Mae partner with Alation to realize hard ROI and business outcomes from data and AI. Alation led the creation of the data catalog market, was named a 2019 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and has been named a five-time leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Alation has been recognized five times by Inc. Magazine as one of the Best Workplaces. To learn more, visit https://www.alation.com.
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