Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

In today’s data-driven software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, the need for complete customer insights often requires fetching and sharing data that lives across multiple API endpoints. That’s why many of our customers want to use Confluent’s data streaming and integration capabilities to implement real-time API chaining—a technique that allows them to automatically follow relationships between APIs.

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has grown over the last several years, it has become increasingly clear to companies and observers that successful AI requires real-time data and context. And it’s not just AI—every critical business function that relies on data inputs needs that data to be as trustworthy and fresh as possible.

Most modern enterprises are generating more data than they can use, let alone integrate, analyze, and extract value from. Some figure out the secret to data value extraction is monetization—identifying data so valuable that other companies will pay for it. And now, the shift to real time data monetization is no longer a strategic option but a fundamental requirement for modern enterprises.

Is your artificial intelligence (AI) underperforming? You're not alone. Stale, fragmented data is a leading obstacle to optimal AI performance. Outdated information cripples your decision-making, fuels operational inefficiencies, and leads to missed opportunities—from slow fraud detection to irrelevant chatbot responses. AI’s rapid evolution makes real-time data even more critical: That’s why real-time data streaming isn’t merely an option.

At Confluent, we've been talking to customers about Streaming Agents—intelligent systems that work in the background responding to system events instead of to human chat inputs. The key question has been: What triggers these events? The signals have to be of high quality for an agent to act on since feeding raw events to an agent can be wasteful and overwhelming. A powerful pattern has emerged: agentic investigation and remediation of anomalies.

AI is redefining what it means to build data-driven businesses. It’s no longer about mining insights from data—it’s about creating intelligent systems that can understand the state of the business and act on its behalf in real time. And in this new era, context data is king. That was the recurring theme at Current New Orleans, the data streaming event that drew in thousands of attendees, in-person and online.