AI Agents in Data Engineering: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming Next

A practitioner’s honest take on where AI is genuinely changing how data pipelines are built, monitored, and fixed—and where it’s still just vendor marketing. THE SITUATIONThe noise arrived before the capability did Something unusual is happening in data engineering right now. The hype curve for AI in data pipelines is running months ahead of the production reality.