Enterprises can quickly move from prototype to production-ready AI agents with Streaming Agents

Confluent, Inc. (Nasdaq: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced Streaming Agents, a new capability in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink^® that makes it easy to build and scale AI agents that monitor, reason, and act on real-time data. Streaming Agents removes barriers to enterprise-grade agentic artificial intelligence (AI) by unifying data processing and AI workflows and providing easy, secure connections to every part of a business, including large language models (LLMs) and embedding models, tools, and other systems. It accelerates the adoption of agentic AI, enabling more efficient workflows, faster time to value, and the creation of entirely new business models and opportunities.

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Building Streaming Agents on Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink

“Agentic AI is on every organization's roadmap. But most companies are stuck in prototype purgatory, falling behind as others race toward measurable outcomes,” said Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent. “Even your smartest AI agents are flying blind if they don’t have fresh business context. Streaming Agents simplifies the messy work of integrating the tools and data that create real intelligence, giving organizations a solid foundation to deploy AI agents that drive meaningful change across the business.”

IDC research shows that while organizations ran an average of 23 generative AI proofs of concept between 2023 and 2024, only three reached production. Of those, just 62% met expectations. Agents are only as powerful as the tools and data they can access, but today’s workflows are painfully complex and costly, blocking businesses from unlocking the full value of agentic AI. While existing AI frameworks make it easy to get started with agents, many teams struggle to integrate real-time data into agentic AI initiatives, resulting in hallucinations and unreliable responses.

“While most enterprises are investing in agentic AI, their data architectures can’t support the autonomous decision-making capabilities these systems require,” said Stewart Bond, Vice President of Data Intelligence and Integration Software at IDC. “Organizations should prioritize agentic AI solutions that offer easy, secure integration and leverage real-time data for the essential context needed for intelligent action.”

Build and Scale Real Time AI Agents With Streaming Agents

Streaming Agents brings agentic AI directly into stream processing pipelines to help teams build, deploy, and orchestrate event-driven agents with Apache Kafka^® and Apache Flink^®. By unifying data processing and AI reasoning, agents gain access to fresh contextual data from real-time sources to quickly adapt and communicate with other agents and systems as conditions change. Streaming Agents are always on and works on a business’s behalf, operating dynamically, processing high-volume data streams, and instantly responding to real-time signals with context-aware reasoning like human operators would. For example, Streaming Agents can do competitive pricing by continuously monitoring prices across ecommerce sites and automatically updating product prices on a retailer’s site to reflect the most competitive offer for customers.

Key features of Streaming Agents include:

• Tool calling for context-aware automation: Tool invocation via Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables agents to select the right external tool, such as a database, software-as-a-service (SaaS), or API, to take meaningful action. Tool calling accounts for what’s happening in the business and what other systems and agents are doing.
• Connections for secure integrations: Securely connect to models, vector databases, and MCP directly using Flink. Connections also protect sensitive credentials, encourage more reusability by sharing connections across multiple tables, models, and functions, and centralize management for large-scale deployments.
• External Tables and Search to boost AI accuracy: Ensure that streaming data is enriched with non-Kafka data sources, such as relational databases and REST APIs, to provide the most current and complete view of data. This improves the accuracy of AI decision-making, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications, reduces cost and complexity by using Flink SQL, and leverages the security and networking capabilities of Confluent Cloud.
• Replayability for iteration and safety: Agents can be developed and evaluated using real data without live side effects, enabling dark launches, A/B testing, and faster iteration.

Streaming Agents are available today in open preview.

Additional Resources

Check out the launch blog to learn about the other new Confluent Cloud features and updates, including Private Networking Interface (PNI) support for Enterprise clusters, Tableflow’s new Upsert feature, and Custom Single Message Transformations (SMTs) for fully managed connectors.

• Start your free trial of Confluent Cloud. No credit card required.
• Ask our Professional Services experts for faster adoption.
• Check out the launch blog for additional Confluent Cloud features.
• Read our Streaming Agents blog to learn more.

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.

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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