Continuous Integration (CI) is a crucial practice in software development that involves regularly integrating code changes into a shared repository, which triggers automated build and test processes. This approach enables early detection and resolution of issues, enhancing code quality, accelerating release cycles, reducing costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. CI promotes agile development with smaller code changes, fault isolation, faster mean time to resolution, reliable testing, and scalability. It also improves team coordination, transparency, and accountability, while facilitating easier maintenance and scalability as projects grow. Chinmay Gaikwad, an expert in cloud-native solutions and CI/CD pipelines, emphasizes the benefits of CI for creating more responsive and customer-focused development processes.