Confluent, Inc., the leader in data streaming technologies, has unveiled Confluent Intelligence during the Dubai stop of its global Data Streaming World Tour. Designed to accelerate the development of real-time, context-aware artificial intelligence, the new platform sits natively within Confluent Cloud and provides organisations with a complete environment to deploy and scale event-driven AI applications. The managed technology stack streams and analyses both historical and real-time data continuously, feeding this context into AI systems to achieve secure, dependable, and highly scalable workloads. With Confluent Intelligence, companies can build AI capabilities grounded in dynamic and trusted data sources.
“Across the Middle East, organisations are rapidly progressing from experimentation to real, production-grade AI. To succeed, they need a robust data foundation capable of delivering trustworthy, contextual information to their AI systems in real time,” said Karim Azar, AVP and GM – Middle East at Confluent. “We’ve seen remarkable examples of how organisations in retail, aviation, finance, banking, telecom, etc. are transforming their businesses with real-time data. With Confluent Intelligence, we’re enabling them to take the next step and harness the full potential of their data to power adaptive, context-aware AI applications. It’s inspiring to see this level of innovation take shape here in the Middle East, driven by some of the region’s most forward-thinking enterprises.”
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.
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.