What to expect from Confluent Current 2025

Intelligent connective tissue

Confluent describes its platform as the “intelligent connective tissue” enabling real-time data from multiple sources to constantly stream across an organisation. The event in New Orleans will offer attendees opportunities to get certified as a Data Streaming Engineer and examine the latest technology (and business requirements) trends shaping this space.

“Current isn’t just made for data people; it’s made by data people. Our program committee spans the globe and areas of expertise to bring you the biggest event in data streaming,” notes the company.

With over 60 sponsors, Current represents what Confluent says will be the best of the “data streaming ecosystem” today. As such, the event is expected to draw some 4000+ attendees across the in-person and online event. 

Lightning AI innovator talks

In 2024, Current showcased over 160 speakers from across the industry, including breakout sessions, lightning talks, AI innovator talks, hands-on sessions and two keynotes. 

“Current is an annual community event that brings together the best minds in data streaming for two days of connection, learning and sharing through hands-on experiences. Current is the only event where the rapidly growing community of data streaming developers, industry innovators and tech leaders come together to pioneer what’s next,” noted Confluent, in its show promotional literature.

Recent news likely to be referenced at the event includes Confluent’s multi-year partnership with the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls (VCARB) Formula 1 team. The VCARB 02 (a Formula One car designed and built by the Visa Cash App RB F1 Team (Racing Bulls) for the 2025 season) now runs with Confluent’s logo on its halo and upper sidepods. 

This “cosmetic” upper branding belies the work going on beneath. Confluent is working with the racing team to bring its data streaming platform to the high-stakes world of Formula 1, giving VCARB the real-time intelligence needed to make faster, smarter decisions on and off the track.

New CTO

Alongside company CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps, new chief technology officer Stephen Deasy (as of Sept 2025) will get a chance to speak. His position is designed to strengthen Confluent’s core infrastructure, which (following the trend of the last 18-months of course) is all about enabling organisations to build and deploy real-time use cases like agentic AI, hyper-personalised customer experiences and automated operations.

“Stephen brings a wealth of experience scaling engineering teams and building platforms that power the world’s most demanding systems,” said Kreps. ”With his leadership, we’ll move even faster to help customers turn data streams into a foundation for AI, smarter decisions and entirely new classes of real-time applications.”

Agentic, always…

This summer also saw Confluent announce Streaming Agents, a capability in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink for users to build and scale AI agents that monitor, reason and act on real-time data. 

“Streaming Agents removes barriers to enterprise-grade agentic artificial intelligence (AI) by unifying data processing and AI workflows and providing easy, secure connections to every part of a business, including large language models (LLMs) and embedding models, tools and other systems,” detailed Confluent, in a technical product statement.

This technology is promised to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI, enabling more efficient workflows and the creation of new business models.

“Agentic AI is on every organisation’s roadmap. But most companies are stuck in prototype purgatory, falling behind as others race toward measurable outcomes,” said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent. “Even your smartest AI agents are flying blind if they don’t have fresh business context.”

Streaming Agents simplifies the messy work of integrating the tools and data that create real intelligence, giving organisations a solid foundation to deploy AI agents that drive meaningful change across the business.

Shift left on data processing

Confluent CEO Kreps’ words from last year’s show are (arguably) most pertinent if we consider his call to firms to shift left on data processing and governance. 

In a summary blog detailing his keynote plenary sessions, he said that increasing demand for data that’s of high quality, reliable, safe to use and discoverable is what’s driving the mindset shift – pushing more companies to shift processing and governance closer to data generation time i.e. shifting left. 

“Shifting your data processing and governance “left” or upstream allows you to eliminate duplicate pipelines, reduce the risk and impact of bad data and leverage high-quality data products for both operational and analytical use cases. It ensures that the data downstream is always fresh and up to date, trustworthy, reliable, discoverable and instantly usable so your teams can build new applications more easily,” said Kreps.

Commentators have suggested that, amidst the technology changes currently afoot here, a certain amount of cultural workflow change will also be required for data engineers to work differently, think differently and execute differently… as the real-time enterprise now emerges more clearly, what happens next will be a fast ride if we’re in the driving seat.

Current takes place October 29-30, 2025 in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps: Shift left (on data processing & data management) for real-time realities.