Introduction
Foundational IQ is a data governance agent built on Foundational's unique ability to map code to lineage across your entire stack. Foundational connects to all your source code and production data systems, from operational databases through data warehouses and into BI tools and your source code repositories, both active and legacy.
Foundational IQ has the broadest and most comprehensive context of any data governance tool. We match this with state-of-the-art models from leading vendors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, and Snowflake Cortex to create the ultimate agent for data governance.
Foundational IQ performs data governance tasks end to end for you by:
Answering questions in plain English about your data ecosystem
Performing tasks like exporting lineage, identifying sensitive data, or creating pull requests
Optimizing pipelines and manage governance policies
How it works
Foundational IQ has access to your code, catalog, lineage, documentation, data quality issues, change history, and governance policies across your entire production data ecosystem.
You can task Foundational IQ to perform any number of data governance actions from start to finish. Alternatively, just ask a question like “Which dashboards depend on the revenue marts table?” or “How much do I spend on unused pipelines annually?"
Example tasks Foundational IQ can perform:
Remove expensive unused tables from your warehouse
Create a Pull Request for renaming the "account" column across all dependencies
Create a report of all tables that contain PII data
Identify PII data that is not properly tagged
Explain the formula used for calculating daily active users
Switch between two modes:
Fast mode: Quick answers for straightforward lookups (default)
Thinking mode: Deeper analysis for complex questions or multi-step reasoning
Data privacy and security
Foundational IQ uses all the information already connected to Foundational, such as metadata from your data platforms, source code, lineage, documentation, data quality issues, and change history across your entire production data ecosystem.
Your organization's data is never shared with other customers or used to train AI models. Foundational IQ processes your data to answer your questions and perform your tasks, but the data remains private to your organization.
Foundational IQ UI
Start a chat
Open from the navigation panel.
Sample response
① Summary with links to tables / columns / dashboards
② Details with explanations and links to relevant source code files
③ Code snippets with links to the source
④ List of references
Sample use cases
Here are some typical ways Foundational IQ can help you.
Trace calculations and transformations across platforms
Trace calculations and transformations across platforms
You want to know... | How Foundational IQ helps |
Which columns feed into fact_orders.total_amount and through which transformations? | Traces the complete column lineage from raw tables through staging models and aggregations into your final fact table, stitching together the path across systems that don't natively talk to each other. Shows you the transformation logic at each step. |
Create a CSV dump of downstream tables from dim_orders | Traces all downstream dependencies from “dim_orders” across transformations and reports, compiling the complete list into a CSV file you can use for migration planning or impact analysis. |
Check impact and validate assumptions before changes
Check impact and validate assumptions before changes
You want to know... | How Foundational IQ helps |
Will anything break if I rename the customer_segment column in dim_customer? | Identifies all downstream references, surfaces hidden dependencies you didn't know about, and shows you exactly what needs updating. |
We're deprecating the legacy_orders table in favor of orders_v2. What's still reading from the old table? | Shows you every query, transformation, dashboard, and report still using the legacy table so you know exactly what needs migration before you can safely deprecate it. |
Investigate and debug data quality issues
Investigate and debug data quality issues
You want to know... | How Foundational IQ helps |
Why is the customer_events pipeline running 4 hours longer than it used to? | Reviews recent changes across multiple PRs, checks schema modifications on upstream tables, and pinpoints the new deduplication logic causing the full table scan. |
Understand unfamiliar code and pipeline logic
Understand unfamiliar code and pipeline logic
You want to know... | How Foundational IQ helps |
How does the daily_snapshot incremental model handle late-arriving data? | Explains the merge logic, partition strategy, and deduplication rules with references to the actual code. This helps you understand pipeline decisions without digging through Git history or asking teammates. |
Execute data governance tasks
Execute data governance tasks
Task you need done... | How Foundational IQ helps |
Remove expensive unused tables from my warehouse. | Identifies tables with high storage costs and low usage, helping you understand which tables are candidates for removal. |
Create a Pull Request for renaming the "account" column. | Analyzes all downstream dependencies that reference this column across your codebase. Foundational then creates a Pull Request that fixes those references across your codebase. |
Create a report of all tables that contain PII data. | Scans your catalog for columns containing personally identifiable information and compiles the results into a comprehensive report. |
Is there any PII data that is not properly tagged? | Reviews your data classification to identify sensitive columns that do not have appropriate governance tags or labels. |
Configure your AI platform
Foundational IQ supports multiple AI vendors: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, and Snowflake Cortex. To configure which AI platform your organization uses, contact Foundational support.