A data pipeline, at its base, is a series of data processing measures that are used to automate the transport and transformation of data between systems or data stores. Data pipelines can be used for a wide range of use cases in a business, including aggregating data on customers for recommendation purposes or customer relationship management, combining and transforming data from multiple sources, as well as collating/streaming real-time data from sensors or transactions.
For example, a company like Airbnb could have data pipelines that go back and forth between their application and their platform of choice to improve customer service. Netflix utilizes a recommendation data pipeline that automates the data science steps for generating movie and series recommendations. Also, depending on the rate at which it updates, a batch or streaming data pipeline can be used to generate and update the data used in an analytics dashboard for stakeholders.