AI Glossary Term
What does “Pipeline” mean?
Definition
An ordered workflow of preprocessing, model steps, and postprocessing stages.
How Pipeline works
Example
A document-processing pipeline might scan a page, run OCR, extract names and dates with a model, check them against rules, and write them to a database. Each step feeds the next.
Why it matters
Real AI products are more than a model. A reliable pipeline handles the steps around it, and a weak step can ruin the final result.
Common questions
Is a pipeline the same as a workflow?
They overlap. Pipeline often stresses a fixed sequence of data-processing stages.
Why use pipelines?
They make steps reusable, testable, and repeatable, which reduces mistakes.
What can go wrong?
An upstream error can pass silently downstream, so checks and monitoring at each stage are useful.