Almost 91% of EMEA leaders note that data streaming platforms keep track of data fed into models for governance purposes, Confluent unveils.
Confluent, Inc. a data streaming platform, unveiled its 2024 Data Streaming Report: Breaking Down the Barriers to Business Agility & Innovation. The report dives into how organisations use data streaming to innovate, accelerate AI adoption, improve business agility, power customer experiences, and overcome data accessibility and management challenges.
“Many organisations have data siloed away in different systems and applications, making it impossible to find and benefit from one of their most critical business assets – their data,” said Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent. “Data streaming acts as the central nervous system for businesses by connecting systems and applications so real-time data can be easily accessed for decision making and improving business processes and customer experiences.”
Based on a survey of 4,110 IT leaders across 12 countries, including the UAE, the report shows the pivotal role data streaming plays in helping businesses maximise the full potential of their data.
Responsiveness is the key to success in today’s dynamic business landscape – slow, inconsistent, outdated, or ungoverned data is detrimental to success because it’s unreliable and can lead to bad decision-making. It’s imperative to leverage continuously streaming data to discover customer learnings, improve business operations, and find insights so organisations can act efficiently and quickly. In fact, 82% of EMEA respondents cite data streaming as a strategic or important priority in IT investments this year.
According to the survey, GenAI is top of mind for many companies, but for AI models to generate accurate and relevant results, the data must be trustworthy, in the right format, and as real-time as possible.
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a common pattern for building GenAI-enabled applications by connecting general-purpose LLM models to domain-specific data while allowing granular access controls and minimising hallucinations.
Data streaming enriches RAG-enabled workloads with trustworthy and contextual data by tapping into a continuous stream of real-time data from systems that power the business. Data streaming efficiently transforms data into the right format to be used by vector databases for AI applications.
Approximately 68% of state investments in GenAI will trend up in the coming two years. Meanwhile, 59% cite data streaming platforms extensively or significantly fuel AI progress by building the real-time data foundation needed to propel these initiatives. Almost 91% of the leaders note that data streaming platforms keep track of data fed into models for governance purposes.
Also Read: Three Considerations To Set Data Streaming Endeavours on the Course for Success
Tackling data access and management challenges head-on is crucial for businesses to maximise success in a data-driven world. The 2024 Data Streaming Report shows that data streaming platforms help organisations address many data accessibility challenges, including uncovering siloed data, that hinder real-time, data-driven operations.
As the central nervous system for businesses, data streaming platforms connect applications and systems to ensure data is available in real-time, everywhere it’s needed. This allows companies to focus on accelerating innovation instead of navigating the maze of point-to-point connections.
More than 80% of the respondents believe that data silos, governance-related problems, and discovering & accessing existing data are the most common problems data streaming can solve.