Let’s say you’re at a company that uses Salesforce, and someone asks:
“Wait, don’t we already have ETL (or iPaaS) ? Why do we need another tool to load data into Salesforce?”
A totally fair question. There are powerful ETL and iPaaS platforms that have been solving complex data problems for years. But here’s the thing: they were built for something else.
ETL/iPaaS: Jack of all trades
These platforms are designed to move data between just about anything—databases, cloud services, APIs, files—no matter the format or protocol. They come packed with hundreds of connectors and transformation rules.
They’re the Swiss Army knives of enterprise integration. Perfect when you’re syncing Workday to Salesforce every week, with a consistent file format and a locked-in mapping. But what if your day looks more like this?
- “Hey, can you load this lead list from this morning’s webinar?”
- “Can you update 20K cases in Service Cloud with this spreadsheet I triaged? Oh, and I forgot to include Record IDs—you can VLOOKUP them in.”
That’s the kind of chaos Marketing Ops managers and Salesforce Admins deal with every day. And that’s exactly where a different kind of tool shines.
Data I Am: Master of one
Data I Am is an AI-powered data loader, purpose-built for Salesforce. Where ETL tools are built for repeatable, engineered pipelines, Data I Am is built for one-off, messy jobs that need to be done right now.
It’s designed to:
- Require zero code, zero prompt engineering
- Fix messy spreadsheets and make them Salesforce-ready
It’s like taking an 18-wheeler truck (ETL/iPaaS) into downtown—powerful, but unwieldy—versus hopping into an autonomous Waymo SUV (Data I Am) that gets you there effortlessly.
TL;DR:
ETL/iPaaS = Jack of all trades
Data I Am = Master of one: Fixing and loading Salesforce data
In our next post, we’ll show how Data I Am tackles these challenges—with a little help from AI.
#FixAndLoadAI #ETL #iPaaS #DataLoader
