Ingestion is the process of importing external data into an AI system to make it searchable and usable. This includes uploading documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, knowledge base articles, or database records and processing them into the format the AI needs.
Good ingestion pipelines handle different file types, clean the content, and structure it for efficient retrieval. The quality of ingestion directly affects what the AI can access and how accurately it can answer questions about that content. A knowledge base full of poorly ingested, poorly structured content will produce poor answers no matter how good the model is.
