A new initiative will expand Confluent’s partnerships and product capabilities to help companies build real-time AI innovations with data streams.
Confluent, Inc., the data streaming pioneer, announced Data Streaming for AI, an initiative to accelerate organisations’ development of real-time AI applications. To help companies unlock the full potential of AI with the freshest contextual data from across their business, Confluent is expanding partnerships with leading companies in the AI and vector database space, including MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz. It is also demonstrating product innovations that incorporate the latest advances in AI into its platform, with capabilities like a generative AI-powered assistant that helps generate code and answer questions about the data streaming environment.
“Data streaming is foundational technology for the future of AI,” said Jay Kreps, CEO and Co-founder, Confluent. “Continuously enriched, trustworthy data streams are key to building next-gen AI applications that are accurate and have the rich, real-time context modern use cases demand. We want to make it easier for every company to build powerful AI applications and are leveraging our expansive ecosystem of partners and data streaming expertise to help achieve that.”
Build a real-time data foundation for modern AI with Confluent
The Confluent Data Streaming for AI initiative aims to help organisations quickly build and scale next-generation AI applications with a shared source of real-time truth for all operational and analytical data, no matter where it lives.
Expanded partnerships
- Connect with Confluent Technology Partners: Confluent is partnering with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz to provide real-time contextual data from anywhere for their vector databases. Vector databases are especially important as they can store, index, and augment large data sets in formats that AI technologies like LLMs require. Through these integrations, Confluent Cloud’s fully managed data streams can now be accessed directly within these partners’ platforms, making it even easier to use real-time data for AI-powered applications. This is just the start as Confluent looks to extend its partnerships in the AI space with the Connect with Confluent program.
- Public Cloud Partners: Confluent is building on its strategic partnership agreements with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to develop integrations, proof of concepts (POCs), and go-to-market efforts specifically around AI. For example, Confluent plans to leverage Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities to improve business insights and operational efficiencies for retail and financial services customers. And, with Azure Open AI and Azure Data Platform, Confluent is planning to create a Copilot Solution Template that enables AI assistants to perform business transactions and provide real-time updates, benefiting industries such as airlines and transportation.
- Services Partners: Confluent is launching POC-ready architectures with Allata and iLink span Confluent’s technology and cloud partners to offer tailored solutions for vertical use cases. Developing, testing, deploying, and tuning these AI applications requires a specific skill set. These partners deliver that to alleviate the guesswork around building real-time AI applications, drastically speeding up time to value.
Product innovations
- Confluent AI Assistant: To help teams get contextual answers they need to speed up engineering innovations on Confluent, the Confluent AI Assistant turns natural language inputs—like “What was my most expensive environment last month?” or “Give me an API request to produce messages to my orders topic”—into helpful suggestions and accurate code that’s specific to their deployment. This is made possible by combining publicly available information, such as Confluent documentation, with contextual customer information to provide specific, timely responses. It will be available to Confluent Cloud customers in 2024.
- AI for Apache Flink® SQL: Over the next several months, Confluent will announce a series of updates to its newly announced Flink service for Confluent Cloud that brings AI capabilities into Flink SQL. On the main stage of Current, the data streaming industry event, Confluent will demo how Flink can make OpenAI API calls directly within Flink SQL. This unlocks endless use cases, such as rating the sentiment of product reviews or summarising vendors’ item descriptions. It will help alleviate the complexities of stream processing, accelerating time to insight.
