Alation Appoints Rick Baker as Chief Operating Officer

Alation Inc., a knowledge layer empowering enterprises to achieve business outcomes, announced the appointment of Rick Baker as COO.

In this role, Baker will lead Alation’s GTM strategy and oversee sales, 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, 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 G 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.