Informatica to build agents, foster agentic AI development
With agents now a major trend in data management, the vendor plans to join the fray by developing agentic capabilities and providing customers with the tools to do the same.
Informatica on Wednesday unveiled its development strategy for agentic AI, including plans to build AI-powered agents to assist users with data management tasks and a service that enables customers to securely develop, connect and manage agentic AI applications.
The vendor revealed Claire Agents and AI Agent Engineering during Informatica World, the data integration vendor's user conference held this week in Las Vegas. Claire Agents will not be available in preview until this fall, while AI Agent Engineering is planned for general availability in the fall as part of Informatica's Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC).
Even though both are still far from general availability, their introduction is significant for Informatica users, according to Stephen Catanzano, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.
"If Informatica delivers on Claire Agents as promised, they will represent a significant leap forward for users," he said. "These autonomous agents will streamline complex data tasks like ingestion, lineage tracking and quality assurance."
The result could be dramatically increased productivity along with improved data accuracy and governance, he continued. AI Agent Engineering, meanwhile, will be important for Informatica customers that want to develop their own agentic applications, according to Catanzano.
"AI Agent Engineering has the potential to be transformative for organizations seeking to build intelligent, scalable agent ecosystems without heavy coding," he said.
Beyond unveiling its plans for agentic AI, Informatica, based in Redwood City, Calif., on May 7 entered a strategic partnership with Microsoft that combines the capabilities of the IDMC with Microsoft capabilities such as Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service and aims to accelerate AI development. In addition, Informatica made Claire Copilot for data integration and cloud application integration generally available.
New AI capabilities
During the initial surge of interest in AI development after OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which marked significant improvement in generative AI (GenAI) technology, building bots called assistants or copilots was the main trend.
Over the past year, AI development has evolved to include agents, which are applications that can act autonomously to surface insights and automate tasks and processes previously done by humans.
While neither Claire Agents nor AI Agent Engineering will be available for some months, it is significant that Informatica is evolving as AI evolves, according to Stewart Bond, an analyst at IDC. As a result, although some vendors have already unveiled similar plans and others made some agentic AI capabilities generally available, Informatica's plans for agentic AI are important for the vendor's users.
Claire Agents are a natural evolution of the capabilities Claire has been providing to users since it was first introduced. These new agents will improve productivity and accuracy of activities performed by data engineers, data stewards, data owners and business analysts.
Stewart BondAnalyst, IDC
"Claire Agents are a natural evolution of the capabilities Claire has been providing to users since it was first introduced," Bond said. "These new agents will improve productivity and accuracy of activities performed by data engineers, data stewards, data owners and business analysts."
Perhaps most beneficial about AI Agent Engineering is that Informatica is potentially saving customers from having to invest in yet another system to gain insights and make decisions, Bond continued.
"We are seeing a lot of these types of platforms emerging … out of application and data integration platforms," he said. "For organizations that are already using IDMC, it means that they may not need to invest in yet another platform for developing their own agents."
Once developed, Claire Agents will include the following capabilities:
Identifying relevant and compliant data for analytics and AI.
Automatically generating data lineage across coding environments.
Building data ingestion pipelines.
Automating and optimizing extract, transform and load workloads for Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Fabric.
Automating data engineering and integration workflows into the IDMC.
Enriching product data in Informatica's master data management tools.
AI Agent Engineering, meanwhile, is a service that enables Informatica customers to develop and manage their own agentic AI applications.
Key capabilities include integration with the IDMC to ensure metadata awareness and context awareness, performance built on Informatica's scalable platform, partner ecosystem support across platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud, and a no-code interface that enables non-technical users as well as trained developers to build agents.
Claire Agents are the natural next step in Informatica's AI strategy, while AI Agent Engineering is being developed in response to the shift in AI from automation to true autonomy, according to Krish Vitaldevara, Informatica's chief product officer.
Regarding the timing of their introduction, giving Informatica users time to plan ahead for the new capabilities is important, he continued.
"It is important to give our customers an early signal of our direction so they know what to expect and can plan accordingly, " Vitaldevara said. "Furthermore, preannouncements can align ecosystem partners."
Bond similarly noted the importance of letting customers know Informatica's intent to keep up with the latest trend.
Developing AI capabilities takes time, as evidenced by continuing rollouts of Claire Copilots -- which were unveiled in May 2024 -- and the time it's taken other vendors to deliver GenAI capabilities.
"If Informatica had not been working on agents, and was not making announcements at their flagship conference, they would be falling behind the competition," Bond said.
Catanzano, however, noted that while the vendor has delivered on past promises, Informatica's introduction of Claire Agents and AI Agent Engineering so far in advance of their availability should be taken with some caution.
"Informatica has a strong track record and industry presence, but until real-world previews or beta versions are available, enterprises should balance enthusiasm with scrutiny," he said.
Looking ahead
Beyond agentic AI, Informatica's roadmap is focused on continuing to improve the IDMC to ensure that customers' data is high-quality and ready to inform AI applications and can lead to business outcomes, according to Vitaldevara.
Catanzano, meanwhile, suggested that Informatica could improve its offering by adding more autonomous decision-making capabilities and new features such as synthetic data generation. It would also be prudent to continue improving existing capabilities as AI evolves.
"Continued innovation in governance, privacy-preserving AI and seamless user experience across all skill levels will be key to sustaining leadership," Catanzano said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
