New initiative will expand Confluent’s partnerships and product capabilities to help companies build real-time AI innovations with data streams
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Sept. 26, 2023 – Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced Data Streaming for AI, an initiative to accelerate organizations’ development of real-time AI applications. Achieving real-time AI demands more than fast algorithms; it requires trustworthy, relevant data served in the moment for smarter, faster insights. 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 Cofounder, 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.”
While the promise of AI has been around for years, there’s been a resurgence thanks to breakthroughs across reusable large language models (LLM), more accessible machine learning models, and more powerful GPU capabilities. This has sparked organizations to accelerate their AI investments. However, a fundamental challenge in modern AI is a lack of access to the relevant, real-time data that AI applications need in a timely, secure, and scalable way.
For the past decade, AI heavily relied on historical data, integrated with slow, batch-based point-to-point pipelines that rendered data stale and inconsistent by the time it arrived. That's no longer adequate for the real-time AI use cases today's businesses are trying to launch, like predictive fraud detection, generative AI travel assistants, or personalized recommendations. Compounding the problem are issues with poor data governance and scalability. As a result, the pace of AI advancements is stifled as developers are constantly tackling issues with out-of-date results and untrustworthy AI hallucinations. This isn’t just a technical hurdle; it’s a roadblock to AI innovation.
"Although there’s significant growth in the number of companies experimenting with generative AI, many face roadblocks from a fractured data infrastructure that lacks real-time data availability and trust,” said Stewart Bond, Vice President, Data Intelligence and Integration Software, IDC. “Data management is the most important area of investment as organizations build an intelligence architecture that delivers insights at scale, supports collective learning, and fosters a data culture. Those that get it right have seen a 4x improvement in business outcomes by removing real-time data availability and trust roadblocks through data streaming, governance, security, and integration–so it’s worth the journey.”
Build a real-time data foundation for modern AI with Confluent
Modern AI applications require multiple technologies and data from numerous domains to seamlessly come together. The Confluent Data Streaming for AI initiative aims to help organizations 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.
"We built an AI platform designed for mission-critical use cases—in industries where businesses simply can’t afford to be wrong,” said David Ferrucci, Founder and CEO, Elemental Cognition. “Our interactive reasoning engine leverages a continuous supply of data that’s reliable, trustworthy and current. Confluent’s data streaming platform makes that possible and enables us to mix and match data from different systems and optimize it for contextually rich insights and answers in real time.”
As part of this launch, Confluent has extended partnerships in the AI space and also committed to delivering more AI capabilities within its own platform to further ease the development of real-time applications.
Expanded partnerships
Product innovations
Dive into Confluent AI use cases at Current 2023 The Current 2023 keynote will showcase real-world Confluent AI use cases and demos of the AI innovations that are part of this launch. Catch it today, September 26 at 8:45 am PT. Register now to tune in virtually. There will also be live demos at the Confluent booth for a deep dive into Confluent’s partnerships for real-time AI applications. Don’t miss out!
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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 the organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich, digital front-end customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven backend operations. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io.
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