Informatica Infuses AI Into Its Data Platform With New Copilots, GenAI ‘Recipes’

A new release of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud offers new copilots for data integration and business automation, improved unstructured data processing, and GenAI “recipes” for faster application integration.

Informatica has stepped up the cloud data integration, unstructured data processing, and master data management capabilities of its AI-powered flagship platform and launched a new line of “GenAI recipe” templates to accelerate the development of GenAI applications.

The announcements Wednesday, which also include new data integration and business automation copilots, are intended to boost access to AI-ready data for businesses and organizations undertaking AI initiatives.

All of the new capabilities and enhancements in the second quarter release of Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform – more than 600 altogether – are geared toward helping “fast track customers’ AI journey,” said Pratik Parekh, Informatica senior vice president and general manager, who leads the company’s cloud integration and modernization business.

Parekh, in an interview with CRN, said Informatica is both utilizing AI within its own platform to improve its capabilities around such tasks as data integration and unstructured data management while also providing customers with the AI-powered tools they need to harness data for their own AI and GenAI initiatives.

“Whether it is business process efficiency, whether it's data pipeline efficiency, whether it's the ability to now take advantage of unstructured data in the context of AI initiatives, whether it's working with the AI models that are stored in Databricks, or Google or Snowflake – we are able to actually exploit all of those things to fast track customers’ AI initiatives and AI journey, because we strongly believe [that] customers’ AI implementations are only going to be as good as the data,” Parekh said.

“And we are not only doing the foundational work of preparing the right data for AI, but we are now exposing capabilities to fast track their AI applications, like composing AI applications, building out those AI workflows, doing operational applications of AI and so on,” the executive said.

Topping the list of new innovations are two copilots – both in preview – built on CLAIRE, the AI engine within the IDMC platform. (The company already offers CLAIRE Copilot assistant, which makes data management recommendations, and CLAIRE GPT, a conversational language interface for the Informatica platform.)

CLAIRE Copilot for data integration helps users generate data pipelines using natural language processing, receive context-aware execution recommendations and automate documentation, enhancing efficiency and transparency in data ingestion, replication and integration, according to the company’s announcement.

Clair Copilot for iPaaS also provides an intuitive Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based interface through which users can create complex multi-step, application-to-application integration processes, generate single-app insights, automate object mappings, and produce business and technical summaries, the company said.

The copilots, which incorporate Informatica’s semantic data model, large language model and design experience, are targeted toward integration developers who build data mappings and data integration flows. While such tasks can take weeks when done manually, Parekh said the copilots can cut that time to as little as an hour.

Leveraging Unstructured Data

The updated IDMC also offers new unstructured data processing capabilities, including AI-powered intelligent parsing, classification and transformations, for harnessing unstructured data – PDF documents, for example – for analytics and AI workloads.

“Unstructured data is now in the forefront of every enterprise as they embark on AI-led initiatives,” Parekh said.

Also new are GenAI Recipes, pre-built integration process templates with AI-based logic and working code, for developing orchestrated workflows for GenAI-driven applications. Informatica is releasing recipes for Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Databricks Mosaic AI, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Gemini, Salesforce Pega Gen AI, ServiceNow Generative AI, and Oracle Select AI, among others, the company said.

Some of these new capabilities work hand-in-hand: Parekh said the recipes are a way to infuse AI into business workflows, for example, and the new data processing capabilities can bring unstructured data into those workflows.

Informatica also announced CLAIRE GPT integration for master data management (MDM). Informatica MDM SaaS is now integrated with CLAIRE GPT to provide NLP-based search and metadata exploration capabilities. Informatica said the new functionality reduces manual data management efforts by automatically generating consistent and comprehensive glossary descriptions and aliases and improving data understanding across teams.

Parekh said that for Informatica partners who provide data governance, data analytics and AI services for customers, the new capabilities will improve partner productivity and allow them to devote more time to higher-level services, rather than underlying integration work, and provide their clients with higher quality results.