Confluent Launches Confluent Intelligence to Solve the AI Context Gap

Confluent, Inc. , the data streaming pioneer, 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.

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“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.

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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.