Confluent, Inc. (Nasdaq: CFLT), a pioneering company in data streaming, has announced Confluent Intelligence, its new solution designed to propel the development of real-time and contextual artificial intelligence. Built on Confluent Cloud, this fully managed platform provides organizations with the tools needed to create and scale event-driven AI systems capable of continuously processing historical and live data. In this way, AI applications receive a steady stream of contextual information that enables greater reliability, security, and scalability.
With Confluent Intelligence, companies can build more dynamic and accurate AI systems, based on high-quality data.
“Effective AI depends on good data. Confluent is our trusted source of information, providing high-quality data to our AI systems and platforms for real-time model training. It supplies the necessary context and coordinates our agents to automate processes, thus driving our transformation into a smarter city,” explains Atilio Ranzuglia, Director of Data and AI at Palmerston North City Council.
According to the MIT’s report, The State of AI in Business 2025, companies are investing between $30 billion and $40 billion in generative AI (GenAI), though 95% of projects still lack tangible results. The main obstacle is the lack of context — a deep understanding of facts, relationships, and meanings that models need to reason effectively.
To overcome this challenge, organizations require infrastructures that transmit and process data continuously, enabling analysis of the past, adaptation to the present, and delivery of up-to-date information to AI applications without delays. This constant cycle of analysis, adaptation, and response is key to evolving from simple chatbots to production-ready AI agents. However, until now, no market solution has integrated all these capabilities in a unified way, leading to fragmented and inefficient workflows.
“We created Confluent to address one of the biggest data challenges: enabling information to flow freely throughout the enterprise so companies can act in real time,” says Jay Kreps, Co-founder and CEO of Confluent. “The same foundation positions Confluent uniquely to close the AI’s contextual gap. Standard models are powerful, but without a continuous flow of data, they can’t make accurate decisions or generate unique business value. That’s where streaming data becomes essential.”
Confluent Intelligence: the engine for enterprise-ready AI
Confluent Intelligence is a service designed for real-time, context-rich AI systems, based on Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®. The platform provides a comprehensive foundation for launching and scaling AI agents and applications. Thanks to features like built-in governance, low-latency performance, and full replay capabilities, Confluent Intelligence accelerates use cases from proof of concept to production more quickly. Its main features include:
- Powering with real-time context engine: this fully managed service transmits structured, reliable 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 interacting with Kafka or managing backend infrastructure. Available in early access.
- Creating with streaming agents: enables native creation, deployment, and orchestration of event-driven agents within Flink. Confluent Intelligence unifies data processing and AI reasoning, allowing agents to observe, decide, and act in real time without relying on constant manual inputs. By integrating agential AI directly into streaming processes, streaming agents help teams deliver intelligent, context-aware automation across the enterprise. Available in early preview.
- Analysis with integrated machine learning functions: simplifies complex data science tasks such as anomaly detection, forecasting, model inference, and real-time visualization directly in Flink SQL. These features give teams the ability to generate valuable insights for smarter, faster decisions. General availability in Confluent Cloud.
“AI use cases in supply chains and procurement are at the heart of GEP’s business,” states Nithin Prasad, Senior Director of Engineering at GEP.
Confluent deepens collaboration with Anthropic to drive the next era of agential AI
Confluent is making Claude, powered by Anthropic, the default large language model (LLM) in Streaming Agents, integrating it natively into Confluent’s leading data streaming platform. This combination allows Anthropic’s reasoning models and Confluent’s real-time streaming capabilities to enable companies to build adaptable, context-rich AI systems — such as advanced anomaly detection that filters noise to prioritize what truly matters or real-time personalized user experiences.