# Introduction to Chicory

Chicory gives **data teams the ability to build, deploy, and manage AI agents.** Agents built using Chicory are powered by a unique combination of data tools and context, intelligently mapping your code, documents and data. This gives Chicory agents the ability to understand and work on your unique data landscape.

**Key Features**

* **Agent Development Life Cycle (ADLC):** Complete framework for Build → Evaluate → Evolve → Deploy → Monitor workflows.
* **Data Understanding Module:** Auto-builds and syncs structured and unstructured data into a unified data model.
* **AI Agent Framework:** End-to-end environment for building, testing, deploying, and versioning data-focused agents.
* **Multi-Agent Orchestration:** MCP Gateways enable complex agent workflows with multiple specialized agents working together.
* **Chicory Agentic Flow:** Orchestrates multi-step analyses and automations (e.g., EDA, pipeline tuning).
* **Automated Runbook Execution:** Define and run complex data processes via structured runbooks (YAML/JSON/Markdown).
* **Intelligent Data Connectors:** Ingest metadata and data from 100s of sources including Databricks, GitHub, Google Drive, and data tools.
* **No Ops Overhead:** We handle training, hosting, and scaling—so you focus on insights.

**Core Use Cases**

* **Data Understanding & Governance:** Ask “Where did this metric come from?” or “What does this column mean?” and get instant, auto-generated lineage and documentation.
* **Data Debugging Agent:** Trigger runbooks on pipeline errors, gather logs, pinpoint failures, and suggest fixes in seconds.
* **Pipeline Optimization:** Analyze your full DAG to surface cost- and latency-hotspots, then recommend configuration tweaks that free up budget.
* **Business Intelligence:** Trace any KPI shift through data, code and dashboards—getting you root-cause answers in minutes.
* **Feature Engineering Agent:** Scan your data estate to discover, score and prioritize the highest-impact variables for every ML model.
* **Data Harmonization:** Automatically align schemas, formats and business definitions at ingest—so datasets are join-ready in hours, not days.

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