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.