The unified platform to build and power contextual AI that scales seamlessly from pilot to production

NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Confluent, Inc ( CFLT ). , the data streaming pioneer, today announced Confluent Intelligence, the fastest path to building and powering context-rich, real-time artificial intelligence (AI). Built on Confluent Cloud, it provides everything organizations need to launch and scale event-driven AI systems. The fully managed stack continuously streams and processes historic and real-time data, delivering this context directly into AI applications for more reliable, secure, and highly scalable AI workloads. With Confluent Intelligence, businesses are able to establish AI systems that are grounded in dynamic, 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.

Enterprises are pouring $30–$40 billion into generative AI (GenAI), yet 95% of initiatives deliver zero return, according to MIT’s The State of AI in Business 2025 report. Their biggest hurdle is context: a complete understanding of the events, relationships, and meaning that off-the-shelf models need to reason effectively. Getting this right demands infrastructure that can stream and process data continuously to evaluate what’s happened in the past, adapt to what’s happening in the moment, and serve that information to AI applications without lag. This always-on cycle of evaluating, adapting, and serving is needed to move beyond a simple chatbot and into production-level AI agents. However, no single offering on the market delivers all these capabilities, resulting in complex, fragmented workflows that are set to fail.

“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 a fully managed service for real-time, context-rich AI systems using Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®. It provides a complete foundation to launch and scale AI agents and applications. With built-in governance, low-latency performance, and full replayability, Confluent Intelligence drives use cases from proof of concept to production faster. Key capabilities include:

Power with Real-Time Context Engine – This fully managed service 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 speed up AI initiatives by accessing real-time context and reliable data in one place, without ever touching Kafka or managing backend infrastructure. Available in Early Access.

Build with Streaming Agents – Build, deploy, and orchestrate event-driven agents natively on Flink. It unifies data processing and AI reasoning for agents that observe, decide, and act in real time without the constant need for manual inputs. By bringing agentic AI directly into stream processing pipelines, Streaming Agents helps teams deliver intelligent, context-aware automation across an enterprise. Available in Open Preview.

Analyze with built-in machine learning (ML) functions – Simplify complex data science tasks, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, model inference, and real-time visualization, directly in Flink SQL. These features enable teams to gain actionable insights for 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.

Confluent Deepens Collaboration With Anthropic to Power the Next Era of Agentic AI

Confluent is making Claude, powered by Anthropic, the default large language model (LLM) on Streaming Agents, and it will be natively integrated within Confluent’s leading data streaming platform. Together, Anthropic’s reasoning models and Confluent’s real-time data foundation enable enterprises to build adaptive, context-rich AI systems, such as advanced anomaly detection that cuts through noise to prioritize what matters or personalization for customized experiences in the moment.

Additional Resources

Learn more about Real-Time Context Engine and the future of AI and data streaming in a blog post from Co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps and a press release.

Dive into new Streaming Agents updates in the launch blog and press release.

Don’t miss out on major launches for Confluent Private Cloud and Tableflow.

About Confluent

Confluent is the data streaming platform that is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure that sets data in motion. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion—designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data from multiple sources to constantly stream across an organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich, digital frontend customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven backend operations. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io.

As our roadmap may change in the future, the features referred to here may change, may not be delivered on time, or may not be delivered at all. This information is not a commitment to deliver any functionality, and customers should make their purchasing decisions based on features that are currently available.

Confluent® and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc. ( CFLT )

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Apache Flink®, and Flink® are registered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Source: Confluent