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Confluent, an IBM Company and the data streaming pioneer, today announced new capabilities in Confluent Intelligence and Confluent Cloud that streamline how real-time artificial intelligence (AI) applications are built and secured. These updates remove the security and complexity barriers that stop organizations from moving AI workloads into the real world.
Confluent introduces fully managed MCP server and Agent Skills for natural language streaming operations management.
Automated PII detection and redaction directly in Flink SQL without custom code or external services.
Azure Private Link support for secure private connectivity to Azure OpenAI, Azure SQL, and Cosmos DB.
Free open source dbt adapter brings Flink SQL into dbt for unified engineering workflows.
McKinsey report: eight in ten companies cite data limitations as roadblock to scaling agentic AI.
Supports TimesFM, Anthropic, and Fireworks AI models for Flink stream processing workflows.
“Most AI projects fail before they reach a single customer because the data layer breaks down,” said Sean Falconer, head of AI at Confluent. “Teams have the models and the mandate, but security risks and fragmented data stop them from shipping. We're fixing that by making the streaming layer the foundation for secure, production-ready AI.”
According to a McKinsey report, “eight in ten companies cite data limitations as a roadblock to scaling agentic AI.” Root causes are often tied to security teams blocking data from entering AI pipelines due to exposure risks and developers losing hours to tool-switching to inspect and manage the data streams their AI depends on.
Natural language operations: Developers can use Confluent MCP as a control plane, allowing AI to build, manage, and debug streaming operations using natural language. Agent Skills encode best practices and workflows for consistent execution. Generally available for Confluent Cloud.
Automated data privacy: A new built-in ML function for PII detection and redaction protects sensitive information directly in Flink SQL, without custom code, external services, or moving data to a warehouse first. Available in early access for Confluent Intelligence.
Secure connectivity: Support for Azure Private Link ensures that AI workloads stay off the public internet with secure, private paths to calling external models and querying external tables. Generally available on Confluent Cloud.
Unified engineering workflows: The free open source dbt adapter brings Flink SQL on Confluent Cloud into dbt, the industry-standard framework data engineers use to build and manage data pipelines. Generally available on Confluent Cloud.
Flexibility with additional model support: Confluent supports TimesFM models for robust anomaly detection as well as Anthropic and Fireworks AI models, which developers can directly use in Flink stream processing workflows.
Confluent, an IBM company, 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.
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