Couchbase accelerates AI agentic application development with new database services

Adding AI services to the company’s Capella cloud database and development platform will give developers more control over data, development workflows, and AI models.

Couchbase is adding new artificial intelligence capabilities to its Capella cloud database that the company says will streamline the development of agentic AI applications.
According to Couchbase, the new Capella AI services unveiled on Monday provide developers with simplified data integration workflows and greater control over data throughout the development lifecycle, including putting agentic applications into production.
AI services help developers reduce data security and privacy risks by bringing together data and large language models – including LLMs that run outside the organization.
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With the new Capella AI services, couchbaseBased in Santa Clara, California, seeks to provide the data management capabilities needed for the growing wave aye and development of generic AI applications.
“This release is all about our offering, which is really targeted at developers building AI and agentic or multi-agentic applications,” Matt McDonough, Couchbase’s senior vice president of product and partners, said in an interview. crn“There is a lot of excitement around AI agents, but the industry as a whole lacks well-defined best practices for building and deploying these agentic applications.”
New AI services come along the lines of Couchbase September announcement Capella Database-as-a-Service features expanded columnar and vector search functionality to develop next-generation adaptive applications – including AI functionalities. Capella is based on Couchbase’s NoSQL database server.
“The key is [to] Make it easier for developers to build, test and deploy AI agents without having to use separate platforms, McDonough said. “And do it in a way that reduces latency, operating costs [and] Putting models and data together as part of this entire agentic AI software development life cycle.
According to the executive, the new AI services are also an enabler for retrieval-enhanced generation workflows that move proprietary data into LLMs.
New AI services include model hosting, automated vectorization, unstructured data preprocessing, and AI agent catalog services – all of which allow developers to prototype, build, test, and deploy AI agents. According to Couchbase, in addition to putting models and data together, the services help organizations reduce development complexity, avoiding the additional latency and higher operating costs often experienced when introducing new technology components and workflows.
“AI’s greatest strength is its ability to process unstructured data,” McDonough said. AI agents can take unstructured information, such as a transcription of a meeting, and autonomously incorporate it into operational applications and workflows. But AI agents need flexible databases with the ability to work with complex data types and unstructured data – such as PDF documents and audio files – to be effective.
Couchbase ISV and systems integrator partners will particularly benefit from the new AI services, McDonough said. ISV partners who develop their applications on the Capella platform can better meet customer requests to add AI agent capabilities to those applications. He said global and regional systems integrators can use the new functionality to expand the range of development services they can provide to their customers.
New Capella AI services include:

  • Model services that provide managed endpoints for leading LLM and embedding models, and capabilities such as prompt and conversation caching, railing, and keyword filtering to support RAG and agentic workflows.
  • Unstructured data services that extract, clean, segment, and convert unstructured documents to JSON, preparing them for vectorization. It also extracts structured information from complex documents and makes it queryable in Capella.
  • Vectorization services that automate vectorization and indexing of data stored in Capella.
  • AI Agent Catalog services that accelerate agentic application development by providing a central repository for metadata, prompt, and audit information, tools for LLM flow, traceability, and governance.
  • Capella AI functions that enable AI-powered data analysis directly into application workflows using familiar SQL++ syntax.

The AI ​​services are currently in private preview and are expected to be generally available as part of the Capella Cloud Database in 2025.