Lesson 8 of 10 · Buying and rollout
Running a proof of concept for an AI context platform
Short answer
A useful proof of concept connects your real stack, runs your own agent questions, and tests lineage, governance and freshness, in a few weeks rather than a few months.
By The Lineage Desk · Best Data Catalogs · Published
Desk research from public vendor pages. Editorial assessment.
2 min read
A proof of concept for a catalog used to mean crawling the warehouse and admiring the search page. For agent readiness the bar is higher: the context must make your agent's answers better, on your data, with your rules.
How long should it take?
Vendors' own statements vary widely. Euno describes zero onboarding lift and automatic mapping from day one. Atlan says most connectors are live within minutes. A customer quote on Select Star's homepage says the product was running the same afternoon. AtScale describes a 30-day workshop from kickoff to results. Treat these as the vendors' claims and plan a short, fixed window with clear exit criteria.
Source: Euno homepage
Source: Atlan connectors
Source: Select Star homepage
What should be in scope?
Connect the systems an agent question actually crosses: at least one warehouse, the transformation layer and the BI tool your executives use. Check integration limits early: Euno caps integrations at 3, 5 or 10 by plan, and other vendors' connector counts range from a few named tools to more than 100.
Source: Euno pricing
Source: DataHub Cloud context platform
Which tests should you run?
Run five. Discovery: ask the agent to find the right asset for ten real questions. Lineage: trace one disputed metric from source columns to the dashboard field and to the agent. Governance: express three rules you enforce by hand and check that the agent respects them. Freshness: rename a column in development and time how long the change takes to reach the agent. Answers: run your benchmark questions with and without the platform and score both.
Who should be in the room?
The data platform lead owns the result. Add an analytics engineer who knows where definitions live, a governance owner for the rules, and someone from security to review what metadata leaves your environment. Several vendors state they read metadata only: Euno and Atlan say so on their pages; ask the others.
Source: Euno homepage
Source: Atlan connectors
What should the vendor provide?
A named technical contact, read access to the configuration they use, and the raw responses their MCP server returned for each of your questions. Ask for the pricing proposal before the proof of concept ends, so the decision does not wait on a quote.
How do you decide?
Use the weights that match your priorities, score each shortlisted platform on your own tests, and compare with our editorial scores. Where they disagree, trust your tests. Write down why you chose, which tests decided it and what you would need to see to reconsider, so the decision survives the next budget review and the next vendor release. Keep the benchmark questions and raw responses from the proof of concept; they become the baseline for the testing loop once the platform is live.
Key points
- Fix the window and the exit criteria before you start.
- Test discovery, lineage, governance, freshness and answers on your own stack.
- Get the raw MCP responses and the price before the proof of concept ends.
Platforms in this lesson