In this nice article it is nicely explained why the AdS side of the AdS/CFT has to be string theory, and some nice examples of stringy features that are indeed found on the CFT side are presented and explained for different applications of the correspondence.
Since a few years, the gravity / fluid dynamics correspondance as a (for me rather surprising but exciting) application of the AdS/CFT business has been discovered too.
My question now is: What are the stringy features, that can be found on the fluid dynamics side, and what would they look like?