From automating routine tasks to providing real-time insights to inform complex decisions, AI agents and copilots are poised to become an integral part of enterprise operations. At least that’s true for the organizations that can figure out how to supply large language models (LLMs) with real-time, contextualized, and trustworthy data in a secure and scalable way.

This article was originally published on InfoWorld on Jan. 28, 2025 While large language models (LLMs) are useful, their real power emerges when they can act on insights, automating a broader range of problems. Reasoning agents have a long history in artificial intelligence (AI) research—they refer to a piece of software that can generalize what it has previously seen to apply in situations it hasn’t seen before.

As real-time data processing becomes a cornerstone of modern applications, the ability to integrate machine learning model inference with Apache Flink offers developers a powerful tool for on-demand predictions in areas like fraud detection, customer personalization, predictive maintenance, and customer support. Flink enables developers to connect real-time data streams to external machine learning models through remote inference, where models are hosted on dedicated model servers and accessed via APIs.

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to turn raw data into actionable insights is no longer a nice to have—it’s a necessity to power exemplary citizen service. Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative is built on the idea that data, when utilized effectively, can transform public services and improve lives.

With almost two years at Confluent under her belt, Suguna Ravanappa has taken impressive strides as a people manager. Her eight-person team of engineers in the Global Support organization helps customers tackle technical challenges in their data streaming environments. According to Suguna, leading this team and being part of Confluent’s unique company culture has helped her develop stronger skills as both a leader and a collaborator. Learn more about her experience.

Confluent and AWS Lambda can be used to build scalable and real-time event-driven architectures (EDAs) that respond to specific business events. Confluent provides a streaming SaaS solution based on Apache Kafka and built on Kora: The Cloud-Native Engine for Apache Kafka, allowing you to focus on building event-driven applications without operating the underlying infrastructure.