Confluent Boosts Real-time AI Security & Scalability

Confluent, an IBM company, has announced new capabilities in Confluent Intelligence and Confluent Cloud. These updates aim to simplify building and securing real-time artificial intelligence applications. The company is addressing challenges like security and complexity that often prevent organizations from using AI workloads effectively. Confluent is integrating Apache Flink pipelines with dbt and introducing a fully managed Model Context Protocol server. They are also adding Agent Skills that allow AI to manage streaming operations. For data privacy, Confluent now offers automated personally identifiable information, or PII, redaction and private connectivity to external models. This embeds enterprise-grade governance directly into data streams. An official from Confluent noted that many AI projects fail because of data layer issues, including security risks and fragmented data. A McKinsey report also highlights that eight out of ten companies cite data limitations as a barrier to scaling agentic AI. These new features are designed to provide a secure and scalable foundation for AI, especially for industries with high stakes like financial services and healthcare. This could help more organizations deploy AI applications successfully.