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.
