Pentaho GenAI Plugin Suite: Connecting PDI Pipelines to LLMs

Most PDI pipelines move structured data: tables, CSV files, APIs. But a lot of useful business data sits in PDFs, Word files, slide decks and web pages, and more and more teams want to feed that content to large language models (LLMs). Pentaho's answer is the GenAI Plugin Suite, a set of PDI step plugins that connect your data pipelines to LLMs such as OpenAI and Azure OpenAI.

In this post I cover what is in the suite, how the pieces fit into a pipeline, how to get it, and what you can do if you do not have the license.

First, the licensing reality

The GenAI plugins are not part of standard PDI. On Pentaho's plugin page they are listed under Limited Availability and marked as requiring an additional paid license, and you get them by contacting Pentaho sales. They were built by Pentaho's Professional Services team together with an early "lighthouse" customer.

So if you install PDI 11 and search the step list for "AI Chat", you will not find it. Keep this in mind before you design a project around these steps.

What is in the suite

Pentaho groups the plugins into three layers that follow a typical GenAI pipeline: get the content in, prepare it, then send it to the model.

What's New in Pentaho 11 for PDI Developers (and Should You Upgrade from 9.x or 10.x?)

Pentaho 11 is the new long-term support (LTS) release of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, following 10.2 from August 2024. Most of the headlines are about the server and the user console, so in this post I focus only on what matters to PDI developers: what changes in your day-to-day work, what might break, and whether you should upgrade from 9.x or 10.x now.

If you have not installed it yet, start with my PDI 11 installation guide.

1. Pipeline Designer: build transformations in the browser

The biggest visible change is Pipeline Designer, a browser-based editor for transformations and jobs. It works much like Spoon, but runs on a modern web UI, so you can build and edit pipelines without installing Spoon on every developer machine.

The important part for existing projects: it is compatible with the .ktr and .kjb files you already built in Spoon. Spoon is not going away, and you can mix the two. My take: keep using Spoon for heavy development and debugging for now, and try Pipeline Designer for quick edits and for team members who should not need a desktop install.

How to Install Pentaho Data Integration 11 on Windows, Mac and Linux (2026)

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) 11 is the current long-term support release of Pentaho. A lot has changed since my PDI 7.0 install guide and the CE 9.3 guide for Mac. The Java requirement is different, the free Community Edition is gone in its old form, and the client is over 1 GB smaller.

This post walks through getting PDI 11 running on Windows, macOS and Linux, plus the errors you are most likely to hit on the way.

Pentaho Data Integration Made Easy: Essential Tips

 

Key Highlights

• Pentaho Data Integration is a powerful tool that simplifies the process of integrating and analyzing data, providing businesses with a seamless user experience.
• It combines data integration with business intelligence, allowing users to access, visualize, and explore data that directly impacts business results.
• Pentaho Kettle, the graphical tool within the Pentaho suite, enables IT and developers to easily access and integrate data from any source- The high-performance capabilities of Pentaho make it ideal for handling large volumes of data and delivering fast analytics.
• With its user-friendly interface and automation features, Pentaho Data Integration streamlines the data integration process, saving time and resources.

Optimizing Data Storage with Pentaho Data Storage Optimizer

 Hi there! Do you need help managing your company's growing data? More information on your systems makes it more challenging to manage storage costs, assure compliance, and stay viable. What if there was a clever data beast-taming solution? Look at this: Pentaho's Data Storage Optimizer simplifies data management to optimize storage and reduce risk.

This helpful application automatically detects, analyzes, and tags structured, semi-structured, and unstructured cloud and on-prem data. Since data value changes over time, it can automate management based on current value and usage. The optimizer uses policy-based governance to cut costs, improve storage infrastructure, and meet service-level needs. Offloading inactive data helps your sustainability aims.

Pretty nice, huh? Pentaho's Data Storage Optimizer provides a unified, intelligent data storage management solution—the smart choice for performance, cost, compliance, and continuity. You now control your data instead of it controlling you. Continue reading!

Pentaho Data Integration - Get file names step

 The Get Filenames step allows you to retrieve information associated with filenames in the file system. The obtained file name is added to the stream as a line. Search for files using wildcard (RegExp) fields

 Stepwise illustration on how to use "Get file names" step given below.

Pentaho Data Integration - Community Edition Install for Mac

 Pentaho is an end-to-end data integration and analytics platform designed to manage data at scale for rapid business innovation, ease of use, and self-service automation and orchestration. Pentaho tightly ties data integration and business analytics in a modern platform that connects IT and business users to access, visualize, and explore all the data that impacts business outcomes. Pentaho Kettle enables IT and developers to integrate data from different sources and deliver it to business applications. 

Step wise illustration on how to install Pentaho Data Integration community edition 9.3.0.0 is given below.