Streaming the Future: Kafka & The Agentic Era

Streaming the Future: Kafka & The Agentic Era event is a builder evening in San Francisco exploring what happens when streaming infrastructure meets AI.

🎤 Main Sessions
Panel: The Future of Kafka + AI Filip Yonov (Aiven), Sijie Guo (StreamNative), Yingjun Wu (RisingWave) Is Kafka becoming the default message bus for AI agents, or is that hype? What does "real-time" actually mean in an AI context? Where does this stack go in the next 2-3 years?
Streaming as the Backbone of Autonomous AI Agents Sijie Guo, CEO, StreamNative When agents need to coordinate, observe, and react, they need a message bus. A practical look at event-driven agent architectures and real-time RAG pipelines.
Designing Real-Time Systems for the Age of Agents Yingjun Wu, CEO, RisingWave Architecture patterns, real-time serving, and event-driven design for the agentic era.
Your Kafka Topics Already Know What They Are Filip Yonov, Head of Streaming, Aiven Live Demo: Watch Claude diagnose a production anomaly from raw Kafka topics in under 30 seconds.
OpenSearch + AI: Building Smarter Search for the Agentic Era Dima Kan, Product Director of Search, Aiven What it actually takes to build AI-native search pipelines that go beyond basic retrieval, including practical patterns for RAG, real-time indexing, and making OpenSearch a backbone for agentic applications.

📅 Agenda
5:30 PM: Doors Open | Networking with light bites and drinks
6:00 PM: Presentations + Q&A
8:00 PM: Post-talk Networking
9:00 PM: Doors Close

🚗 Getting There
House of AI 40 Boardman Pl, SoMa, San Francisco
Caltrain (SF Station / 4th & King): A 12 minute walk. It's about 0.7 miles away.
Muni (4th & Brannan Station): A 10-12-minute walk. This is the closest light rail stop.
Muni Bus: The 8, 12, 30, and 45 lines all have stops within 2–3 blocks of Boardman Pl.
Parking: Extremely limited. We strongly recommend using Uber/Lyft/Waymo or public transit to avoid the stress of SoMa parking.

👋 About the Organizers
Aiven is an open-source data infrastructure platform providing managed databases, streaming, and analytics — including PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, OpenSearch, and ClickHouse — across all major clouds.
StreamNative provides a cloud-native event streaming platform powered by Apache Pulsar, designed to handle high-throughput, real-time data for modern AI applications.
RisingWave is the distributed SQL streaming database that enables developers to build real-time applications with the ease of standard SQL.