Data Pipeline
A data pipeline is an automated system that collects, moves, and processes data from various sources to a destination where it can be analyzed.
For small businesses that collect data from multiple systems—like an e-commerce platform, CRM, accounting software, and marketing tools—a data pipeline is essential. It automates the process of extracting data from these different sources, transforming it into a consistent format, and loading it into a central location (like a data warehouse or BI tool) for analysis. While not always directly AI, data pipelines often feed data to AI models for further processing and insights. This ensures that a business's data is always current, accurate, and readily available for reporting and decision-making, removing the manual effort of data consolidation.
A SaaS startup uses a data pipeline to pull customer usage data from their application, subscription information from their billing system, and support tickets from their help desk into a single database for analysis of customer churn and feature adoption.