Flink AI: Real-Time ML and GenAI Enrichment of Streaming Data with Flink SQL on Confluent Cloud

Modern data platforms are crucial for businesses to extract valuable insights from various sources of data. Data streaming and batch processing frameworks help provide these insights, with stream processing enabling real-time reactions to changing events. Managed Apache Kafka clusters on Confluent Cloud have become the standard for building sophisticated data streaming applications. Flink AI (FLIP-437) opens up a new paradigm for Flink SQL on Confluent Cloud by making machine learning models first-class citizens, allowing integration between AI workloads and streaming data in real time. This feature is currently in early access mode but will be made generally available soon. The use of generative AI (GenAI) large language model (LLM) endpoints and narrow AI models can enrich the quality of streaming data instantly, enabling smarter applications through real-time ML predictions.