IBM subsidiary Confluent has announced new capabilities in Confluent Intelligence and Confluent Cloud, intended to streamline how real-time AI applications are built and secured.
Developers can now use Confluent MCP as a control plane, allowing AI to build, manage, and debug streaming operations using natural language. Agent Skills adds a second layer, encoding best practices and workflows so those operations are executed consistently and in line with organisational standards.
Together, they aim to enable developers to create and continuously improve real-time applications using AI-powered tools, bringing streaming into modern, agent-driven development workflows. Generally available for Confluent Cloud.
A new built-in ML function for PII detection and redaction protects sensitive information directly in Flink SQL, without custom code, external services, or moving data to a warehouse first.
Support for Azure Private Link ensures that AI workloads stay off the public internet with secure, private paths to calling external models and querying external tables. Now, Flink jobs can securely connect to Azure-hosted services such as Azure OpenAI, Azure SQL, and Cosmos DB over Microsoft's private backbone. Generally available on Confluent Cloud.
The free open source dbt adapter brings Flink SQL on Confluent Cloud into dbt, meaning teams can immediately define, test, and deploy streaming pipelines using the same dbt commands and project structure they rely on today.
"In APAC, the race to deploy AI is hitting a hard reality: most projects never make it past the pilot phase because the data layer isn't secure or scalable enough for production. We're changing that," said Greg Taylor, Confluent’s vice president and general manager for APAC.
“With automated privacy and AI-native tooling, we’re giving organisations a clear, secure path to creating real world use cases that actually move the needle for the business,” he said.
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