Confluent, a leader in data streaming, has introduced Streaming Agents a new capability in Confluent Cloud that brings powerful innovation to Apache Flink. This new feature helps businesses more easily build and scale AI agents that can monitor, reason, and take action in real time. By unifying data processing with AI workflows, Streaming Agents remove key barriers to enterprise-grade agentic artificial intelligence (AI). In turn, organizations gain secure, seamless connections across all parts of their operations from large language models (LLMs) and embedding models to tools and external systems. Ultimately, this innovation accelerates AI adoption, enabling faster workflows, quicker time to value, and entirely new opportunities for business growth.

Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent, highlighted the pressing need for solutions like this, stating: “Agentic AI is on every organization’s roadmap. But most companies are stuck in prototype purgatory, falling behind as others race toward measurable outcomes. 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.”

AI Authority Trend: 90 Percent of IT Leaders Say Data Streaming Fuels AI Innovation – Confluent Report

Recent research from IDC underscores this challenge. Between 2023 and 2024, companies tested an average of 23 generative AI proof-of-concepts but only three actually made it into production. Of those, just 62% achieved expectations. The primary obstacle lies in integrating real-time data into AI agents. Without this, businesses face hallucinations, unreliable responses, and high costs.

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

Transforming AI Workflows with Streaming Agents

With Streaming Agents, Confluent is weaving agentic AI directly into stream processing pipelines. Teams can now use Apache Kafka and Apache Flink to build, deploy, and manage event-driven agents that tap into fresh, real-time data allowing them to adapt quickly and interact with systems and other agents as conditions change. Operating continuously, Streaming Agents process massive data streams and respond instantly with context-aware reasoning, similar to human operators.

AI Authority Trend: Confluent Merges Batch and Stream Processing for Smarter Agentic AI

For instance, retailers can leverage Streaming Agents for competitive pricing by monitoring e-commerce sites in real time and automatically updating their own product prices to ensure the most attractive offers for customers.

Key features of Streaming Agents include:

  • Tool Calling for Intelligent Automation – Through Model Context Protocol (MCP), agents can invoke the right external tools, from APIs to SaaS platforms, to act on real business conditions.
  • Secure Connections for Integration – Businesses can connect securely to models, vector databases, and other systems, ensuring safe credential management and scalability.
  • External Tables and Search for Higher Accuracy – Streaming data can be enriched with external sources, improving AI decision-making, vector searches, and RAG applications while lowering costs and complexity.
  • Replayability for Safety and Iteration – Teams can test and refine agents using real data without live side effects, enabling A/B testing, dark launches, and rapid innovation.

With these capabilities, Confluent positions Streaming Agents as a catalyst for the next wave of enterprise AI adoption, bridging the gap between experimental prototypes and production-ready solutions.

AI Authority Trend: Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink Simplifies Real-Time AI Development

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