Big-data company Informatica LLC is jumping into agentic artificial intelligence at the deep end, unleashing a wave of new AI agents aimed at helping companies automate some of the most laborious tasks associated with enterprise data management.

Today the company announced the coming availability of a suite of AI agents called CLAIRE, alongside a set of tools for companies to create their own, fully customized agents for data management. The company is building on earlier AI initiatives such as its CLAIRE GPT and CLAIRE Copilots, and a set of reference architectures and templates for building generative AI applications on cloud platforms such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Informatica believes its Intelligent Data Management Cloud product can be the ideal foundation for AI agents. Its core platform is used by companies to transfer data between disparate systems. For example, a customer might use it to bring data from its sales logs into an analytics platform to try to get insights into consumer buying habits. Informatica’s platform does all of the heavy lifting in this process, syncing information among the different systems, reformatting the data and so on.

The company said this platform provides a “critical metadata system of intelligence” that can aid AI agents in the decision-making process. The CLAIRE Agents, set to launch in the fall, will combine this metadata foundation with AI-powered reasoning and planning to automate complex data operations such as data ingestion, quality assurance and lineage tracking.

AI automation comes to data management

The catalogue of CLAIRE Agents includes a Data Quality agent that will be able to continuously monitor and remediate data quality issues across any data system, including cloud data warehouses and other repositories. There will also be a Data Discovery agent for identifying relevant, trusted and compliant data assets for analytics and AI workloads, and a Data Ingestion agent that aids in the creation of data pipelines. Other examples include an ELT agent for automating extract, load and transform workloads, and a Modernization agent for data engineering tasks.

According to Informatica, the CLAIRE Agents are fully integrated with its Intelligent Data Management Cloud, designed to help customers get a handle on the escalating demands of data management that stem from increased adoption of AI technologies.

One of the key components is Informatica’s Metadata System of Intelligence, which is an upgraded version of its proprietary metadata engine that adds AI-generated and human-curated context to each customer’s data environment.

The company promised that the CLAIRE Agents will be compatible with data platforms from Amazon Web Services Inc., Databricks Inc., Google Cloud, Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Snowflake Inc., as well as open standards such as the Model Context Protocol. Users will be able to select from a range of large language models, such as Google’s Gemini, Databricks’ Mosaic AI, Snowflake Cortex and Oracle Generative AI to power the agents.

Informatica Chief Executive Amit Walia said the CLAIRE Agents pave the way for a new era of autonomous data management. “Our platform doesn’t just connect data,” he said. “It empowers it with context, governance and purpose, enabling customers to turn fragmented AI efforts into orchestrated, trusted and transformative business outcomes.”

Multi-agent orchestration

The CLAIRE Agents will be joined by a new AI Agent Engineering service within the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for companies to create, connect and manage entire fleets of multi-agent AI systems. When it launches in fall, it will provide a unified, no-code environment for orchestrating AI agents across environments such as AWS, Azure, Databricks, Salesforce and ServiceNow. In turn, this will enable enterprises to connect various siloes of information to deliver better business outcomes.

The AI Agent Engineering service is said to be metadata-aware and context-intelligent, and will enable AI agents to leverage existing investments in the company’s platform, such as mappings and business processes. Teams will be able to create highly customized AI agents and connect them across multiple enterprise environments, while managing everything through a single platform.

These new offerings are still several months away, but Informatica customers won’t have to wait long to get started in automating their data environments. The company said its previously announced CLAIRE Copilot will hit general availability later this month.

CLAIRE Copilot is said to leverage LLMs such as Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI GPT to help developers in generating, documenting and optimizing complex data transformations and integration pipelines. The big promise is that developers will be able to spend more time on building features for their applications, and less time worrying about the data that feeds them.

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