Explainable AI (XAI) is currently one of the most discussed topics in the field of AI. Developments such as the European Union's AI Act, which makes explainability a mandatory property of AI models in critical domains, have brought XAI into the focus of many companies developing or applying AI models. As this now applies to a large part of the economy, the demand for methods that can describe the decisions of models in a comprehensible way has increased immensely.

From time to time, a new software system appears on the horizon of the technology landscape. In this paper we look at such a new data access and processing layer: the feature store. It will play an important role in the construction of intelligent systems based on machine learning (ML) algorithms.