Confluent, a pioneer in data streaming, unveiled Confluent Intelligence the most direct route for enterprises to build and power context-rich, real-time artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Built atop Confluent Cloud, the platform delivers a fully managed stack that continuously streams and processes both historical and real-time data, providing the essential context directly into AI applications for more reliable, secure, and scalable AI workloads. With Confluent Intelligence, organizations can establish AI systems grounded in dynamic and trustworthy data.
“Good AI needs good data. Confluent is our trusted source of truth, streaming high-quality data to our data lakes and AI platforms to train models in real time. It provides context and orchestration for our agents to automate workflows, accelerating our smart city transformation,” said Atilio Ranzuglia, Head of Data and AI at Palmerston North City Council.
With enterprises investing an estimated $30-$40 billion in generative AI (GenAI) initiatives yet facing a 95 % failure rate in terms of return the predominant barrier is inadequate context: a full understanding of events, relationships and meaning that off-the-shelf models require to reason effectively.
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To tackle this, organizations require infrastructure that can continuously stream and process data, assess what has occurred, adapt to what is happening now and deliver that insight into AI applications without latency. This persistent loop of evaluation, adaptation and delivery is critical to transition from basic chatbot capabilities to production-grade AI agents. Until now, no single offering in the market provided that entire capability stack, resulting in fragmented workflows and elevated risk of failure.
“We started Confluent to take on one of the hardest problems in data: helping information move freely across a business so companies can act in real time,” said Jay Kreps, Co-founder and CEO at Confluent. “That same foundation uniquely positions Confluent to close the AI context gap. Off-the-shelf models are powerful, but without the continuous flow of data, they can’t deliver decisions that are timely and uniquely valuable to a business. That’s where data streaming becomes essential.”
Confluent Intelligence: The Engine of Enterprise-Ready AI
Confluent Intelligence is described as a fully managed service for real-time, context-rich AI systems utilizing Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®. The offering is designed to provide a comprehensive foundation to deploy and scale AI agents and applications from pilot to production with built-in governance, low latency performance and full replayability.
Key capabilities include:
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Power with Real-Time Context Engine – A fully managed service that streams structured, trustworthy context to any AI agent or application, whether built on Kafka and Flink or integrated externally via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). With the Real-Time Context Engine, teams can accelerate AI initiatives by accessing real-time context and reliable data in one place without ever managing backend infrastructure. (Available in Early Access.)
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Build with Streaming Agents – Enables the building, deployment and orchestration of event-driven agents natively on Flink. These are designed to unify data processing and AI reasoning for agents that observe, decide and act in real time without continuous manual inputs. Streaming Agents brings intelligent, context-aware automation across the enterprise. (Available in Open Preview.)
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Analyze with built-in machine learning (ML) functions – Simplifies complex data science tasks such as anomaly detection, forecasting, model inference and real-time visualization directly in Flink SQL. These features enable teams to derive actionable insights that drive smarter decisions with greater speed and agility. (General Availability on Confluent Cloud.)
“AI-powered procurement and supply chain use cases are at the core of what GEP does. Confluent helps make them possible by providing a data streaming platform that fuels our models with real-time streaming data and eliminates fear of data loss,” said Nithin Prasad, Senior Engineering Manager at GEP.
Deepening Collaboration With Anthropic to Power the Next Era of Agentic AI
Confluent is deepening its partnership with Anthropic to make Claude the default large-language model (LLM) on Streaming Agents. The native integration of Claude within Confluent’s industry-leading data streaming platform combines Anthropic’s reasoning models with Confluent’s real-time data foundation enabling enterprises to create adaptive, context-rich AI systems such as advanced anomaly detection or hyper-personalized customer experiences in the moment.
