TDWI Top Trends | Modernizing Data Pipelines
August 20, 2026
It is a demanding time for data engineering. Many enterprises have already modernized their data platforms once by moving to the cloud, but the pipelines that fed those platforms often remained the same.
To support modern data uses, today’s teams are now reexamining everything and rebuilding rather than relocating. This is when modernization becomes real.
Previously, data integration tools were focused on workflow, but AI systems do not consume data as one step in a flow. Data products and agents are now specified by their end state. Increasingly, the engineer defines the result they want, and the platform works out the steps to get there. Underlying all the trends in this report is this trend away from the procedural design of processes toward declarative data engineering.
This report looks at six major trends in how pipelines and the practices of data engineering are changing to deliver more value and support future agentic AI applications.