Confluent adds Agent Skills, automated data privacy

Confluent announced additions to Confluent Cloud and Confluent Intelligence designed to add real-time data and context into AI applications.

The news builds on a series of Confluent integrations with various IBM offerings announced at IBM Think. See: IBM buys Confluent for $11 billion: Here's what Big Blue gets

Confluent is among a band of enterprises vendors that can give IT buyers optionality amid almost daily AI advances. Confluent announced the following:

• Agent Skills, a second layer to go with Confluent MCP, a control plane for AI. Agent Skills has best practices and workflows to improve AI agents and is generally available in Confluent Cloud.
• Automated data privacy via a built-in function to detect personally identifiable information and redact it directly in Flink SQL. Automated data privacy is designed for regulated industries and available in early access for Confluent Intelligence.
• Support for Azure Private Link generally available in Confluent Cloud. Flink jobs can connect to Azure hosted services.
• Unified engineering workflows via a free open source dbt adapter that brings Flink SQL on Confluent cloud into dbt. Dbt is a standard framework that data engineers use to build and manage pipelines.
• Support for more models. Confluent said it will support TimesFM models for anomaly detection as well as Anthropic and Fireworks AI models.

Last week, IBM announced a series of integrations with Confluent and watsonx.data.