Introducing Real-Time Context Engine for AI

Introduces the Real-Time Context Engine, a new managed service in Confluent Cloud (Early Access) that acts as a serving layer for streaming data to AI systems. It materializes continuously processed and enriched enterprise data sets into a fast, in-memory cache and serves them via Model Context Protocol (MCP). This addresses the challenge of providing real-time, contextualized data to AI applications by unifying historical replay, continuous processing, and real-time serving. The engine abstracts Kafka and Flink complexity, offering built-in authentication, RBAC, and audit logging, and automatically reprocesses data when upstream definitions change.