Data Engineering
What is Data Engineering (and why your company probably already needs it)
If your company's reports take hours to put together, if every department has "its own version" of the same number, or if nobody fully trusts the data they're looking at, that's not a tooling problem, it's a data engineering problem.
Data engineering is the work of making information flow reliably between systems, in a format any team can use without manual rework. It's the foundation that makes any AI or automation initiative actually work, without it, everything else is more fragile than it looks.
Companies that invest early in data engineering aren't doing it for prettier reports, they're doing it to gain decision-making speed, because any decision based on unreliable data is, in practice, a guess dressed up as a spreadsheet.