Friday Tech News

Updates & Trends in Enterprise Technology | 05.23.2025

Author

Phil Moroni
May 23, 2025

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Friday Tech News! I hope you’ve had a wonderful week.

I’m writing this weeks FTN - which is now officially coming out bi-weekly for the summer due to how busy I am at Phoenix - from beautiful Barcelona. I’m here for the AppSec OWASP conference happening next week, and just spent the last week in Brussels at FS-ISAC. Wonderful time meeting people over here who are all trying to solve modern enterprise security related issues and grapple AI.

Brussels was pretty tight

Best Booth Duo You’ll Find

This week has a plethora of funding updates and AI related announcements. The AI landscape continues to evolve and is shifting from assistive automation to autonomous decision making, with enterprises racing to integrate multi-agent workflows (still think there’s a better term) into their environments. The latest wave of announcements (tons of them below) signals a future where AI doesn’t just support human workflows but executes them independently.

To me, I think this raises a huge question: What is our role as humans in this expanding AI driven Enterprise? Are people really this focused on using Agentic AI Agents as much as they can? As these Agents take on coding, security, IT Ops, marketing, and even sales, businesses will need to redefine governance, oversight, and ethical boundaries for safe use of AI.

Take a read below, and feel free to comment or reply with any questions!

Thanks, and stay physically & digitally safe. See you in 2 weeks!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

  • GitHub Integration: OpenAI's ChatGPT deep research tool now connects to GitHub allowing devs to analyze codebases and engineering documents directly.

  • Expanded AI Capabilities: The new connector enables users to break down product specs, summarize code structures, and understand API implementations using real examples.

  • Selective Access & Limitations: The integration respects organizational settings, ensuring users only access GitHub content they’re permitted to view while acknowledging potential AI-generated errors.

  • Autonomous AI Security Agents: ServiceNow introduced AI-driven agents designed to enhance cybersecurity by automating risk management and accelerating response times.

  • Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations with Microsoft and Cisco aim to create AI-to-AI ecosystems, improving security, governance, and operational resilience.

  • Expanded Risk Management: New capabilities like AI Control Tower and Digital Operational Resilience Management (DORM) extend security beyond cyber threats to business continuity and compliance.

  • AI-Driven Data Management: Alation launched the Data Products Builder Agent, an AI-powered tool that helps organizations convert raw data into trusted, reusable data products for AI, compliance, and business decisions.

  • Automation & Governance: The tool streamlines the data product lifecycle, ensuring quality, governance, and interoperability, while keeping human oversight in the loop.

  • Open Data Standards & Industry Collaboration: Alation joined the Open Data Product Technical Steering Committee, reinforcing its commitment to open, interoperable, and business-ready data ecosystems.

  • If you don’t use these features you’re missing out.

  • OneDrive & SharePoint Connector: After launching GitHub integration, OpenAI now allows ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users to connect Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint for deep research, analyzing live document data.

  • Enterprise Expansion Plans: The integration is currently in beta and unavailable in the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK, but OpenAI plans to extend it to ChatGPT Enterprise users in the future.

  • Admin Approval Required: Microsoft 365 administrators must grant tenant-wide admin consent for organizations to enable the ChatGPT connector within their OneDrive and SharePoint environments.

  • AI-Powered Compliance & Archiving: Proofpoint launched a next-gen digital communications governance (DCG) solution, featuring real-time search, AI-driven supervision, and surveillance to help organizations manage compliance across various digital channels.

  • Expanded Capture & Risk Management: The platform now supports 80+ digital communication channels, including messaging apps, video calls, and social media, ensuring comprehensive governance and risk mitigation.

  • Cloud-Based & Regulatory Compliance: Proofpoint’s AWS-hosted archive enables fast search capabilities, while meeting FINRA, FCA, HIPAA, and GDPR regulatory standards for secure data management.

  • AI-Powered VPN Diagnostics: Aviatrix launched the Secure Network Supervisor Agent, leveraging Microsoft Security Copilot to automate VPN troubleshooting, reducing downtime and security risks.

  • Deep Cloud & Multicloud Visibility: The tool provides granular monitoring across cloud environments, helping enterprises quickly identify and resolve VPN misconfigurations.

  • Operational Efficiency & Security: By guiding junior engineers through troubleshooting workflows, it reduces reliance on senior staff, enhances security compliance, and prevents costly outages.

  • Enhanced Performance: OpenAI introduced GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, improving coding capabilities, instruction following, and long-context comprehension.

  • Long-Context Support: The models can process up to 1 million tokens, significantly enhancing their ability to retrieve and reason over dispersed information.

  • Cost & Efficiency Improvements: GPT-4.1 is 26% cheaper than GPT-4o, with prompt caching discounts raised to 75%, making long-context usage more affordable.

  • Kafka-Powered Data Management: Kong introduced Event Gateway, a tool that integrates with Apache Kafka to help organizations manage real-time data streams alongside their APIs.

  • Security & Observability Features: The gateway encrypts data, enforces authentication, and provides monitoring capabilities, ensuring secure and efficient data access.

  • Simplified Development & Scalability: It allows applications to access Kafka data via standard HTTPS APIs, eliminating the need for custom protocols and enabling multi-team collaboration without duplicating data streams.

  • AI-Powered Marketing Insights: Databricks launched Data Intelligence for Marketing, unifying customer and campaign data to help marketers self-serve insights and run smarter, more efficient campaigns.

  • Real-Time Personalization: The platform enables instant audience segmentation, predictive analytics, and automated personalization, integrating with top marketing solution providers like Adobe, Salesforce, and Hightouch.

  • AI-Driven Anomaly Detection: Qlik introduced a discovery agent that continuously scans business data, automatically surfacing critical risks and opportunities before they escalate.

  • Advanced Forecasting & Data Prep: The platform now includes multivariate time series forecasting for complex trend analysis and a no-code table recipe tool for faster data preparation.

  • Integrated Decision Workflows: New features like write table allow users to annotate and update data live, enabling seamless execution within analytics environments.

  • AI Agent Reliability & Error Detection: Percival is designed to automatically identify failures in AI agent systems, helping enterprises monitor and optimize autonomous workflows.

  • Episodic Memory & Multi-Agent Oversight: The platform uses episodic memory to track errors across AI interactions, detecting 20+ failure modes in reasoning, execution, planning, and domain-specific tasks.

  • Enterprise Adoption & AI Governance: Early adopters like Emergence AI and Nova are leveraging Percival to manage complex AI agent environments, ensuring scalability and reliability in mission-critical applications.

  • Automated Data Management: Informatica introduced Claire Agents, AI-powered tools designed to automate data quality, governance, and pipeline generation within its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC).

  • Multi-Agent Orchestration & Integration: The agents support Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling seamless interoperability with platforms like Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and MongoDB.

  • Enterprise Adoption & Challenges: While AI agents promise efficiency and scalability, experts highlight security concerns and adoption hurdles, emphasizing the need for training, governance, and operational support.

  • AI-Powered Analytics & Governance: Alteryx One integrates low-code/no-code data prep, AI assistance, and enterprise governance into a single platform, eliminating trade-offs between flexibility and security.

  • Cloud Connectivity & Real-Time Data Access: The platform enhances direct access to cloud data with expanded integrations for Databricks, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, and Qlik, enabling real-time analytics without costly data movement.

  • New AI Features & Automation: Alteryx introduced Magic Reports, Alteryx Copilot, and GenAI Tools, bringing automated reporting, AI-assisted workflow creation, and generative AI capabilities to enterprise analytics.

  • AI-Native Developer Experience: GitLab 18 integrates AI-powered Code Suggestions and Chat directly into developer workflows, offering real-time code completion, refactoring, and test generation at no extra cost for Premium and Ultimate users.

  • Enhanced DevSecOps & Compliance: The update strengthens artifact management, CI/CD pipeline optimization, and security visibility, introducing custom compliance frameworks, vulnerability dashboards, and FIDO passkey support.

  • Expanded AI Offerings: GitLab Premium customers can now purchase Duo Enterprise, unlocking advanced AI-driven collaboration and security features without upgrading to GitLab Ultimate.

  • AI-Powered Coding Assistant: OpenAI introduced Codex, an advanced AI coding agent designed for professional software development, capable of writing features, fixing bugs, and generating pull requests.

  • Secure & Integrated Development: Codex runs in a sandboxed environment with no external internet access, ensuring safety and preventing misuse, while integrating directly with GitHub for live codebase interaction.

  • Competitive AI Expansion: This release marks OpenAI’s move into AI-powered developer tools, challenging Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, and positioning ChatGPT as a multi-agent productivity platform.

  • AI-Powered Coding Automation: GitHub introduced an enterprise-ready coding agent for Copilot, embedded in GitHub and accessible from VS Code, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode, enabling agentic DevOps workflows.

  • Secure & Integrated Development: The agent operates within GitHub’s control layer, ensuring branch protections, controlled internet access, and human approval for pull requests to maintain security.

  • Expanded AI Capabilities: GitHub is open-sourcing Copilot Chat, integrating Grok 3 from xAI, and rolling out agent mode across multiple development environments to enhance AI-driven coding collaboration.

  • AI Agent Security & Governance: Glean integrates Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS to enhance AI agent security, preventing prompt injection, unauthorized access, and sensitive data exposure.

  • Enterprise-Grade AI Protection: Prisma AIRS provides runtime security, posture management, and AI red teaming, ensuring secure AI adoption at scale across 100+ SaaS applications.

  • Zero-Trust AI Search & Access: Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access Browser enables secure AI-powered search, mitigating shadow IT risks while enforcing real-time security policies.

  • Expanding AI Model Offerings: Microsoft will host AI models from xAI, Meta, Mistral, and Black Forest Labs in its own data centers, ensuring reliability and availability for Azure customers.

  • New AI Coding Agent: GitHub Copilot now includes an AI coding agent, capable of autonomously fixing bugs and completing coding tasks, with human review before final implementation.

  • Enterprise AI Development: Microsoft introduced Azure Foundry, a service enabling businesses to build custom AI agents using a mix of different AI models for various internal tasks.

  • Cloud-Optimized Performance: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 introduces pre-tuned, ready-to-run images for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, ensuring seamless workload deployment and management.

  • Enhanced Security & Observability: The platform includes Secure Boot, Confidential Computing, and telemetry options, providing stronger security and unified visibility across cloud environments.

  • Flexible Procurement & Migration: Organizations can use existing Red Hat subscriptions or opt for pay-as-you-go models, with committed spend programs available across major cloud providers.

  • Enterprise-Grade Security: Docker launched Hardened Images, a curated catalog of secure container images designed for enterprise environments, ensuring compliance and minimal vulnerabilities.

  • Built-In Security & Compliance: The images meet SLSA Level 3 standards, run with minimal privileges, and include SBOMs, VEX statements, and digital signatures for full transparency.

  • Industry Collaboration: Partners like GitLab, JFrog, Microsoft, Neo4j, Sysdig, and Wiz are joining the Docker Hardened Images ecosystem, reinforcing security across the software supply chain.

  • This is super interesting to me. Really curious if SMB’s will adopt something like this in the future to help, and how it will impact current tech workers.

  • Autonomous IT Ticket Resolution: Atera launched IT Autopilot, an AI-driven system that resolves Tier 1 IT tickets like password resets and reboots without human intervention, reducing technician workload.

  • Efficiency & Work-Life Balance: IT Autopilot handles up to 40% of IT workloads, enabling response times as low as 0.1 seconds and average resolution times of 15 minutes, freeing IT teams for higher-value tasks.

  • Agentic AI Capabilities: Unlike traditional automation, IT Autopilot retains memory, plans, interfaces with applications, and learns from experience, making it a true autonomous IT solution.

  • Atera’s IT Autopilot represents a paradigm shift in IT management, moving beyond simple automation to fully autonomous AI-driven operations. This could reshape IT roles, allowing professionals to focus on strategic problem-solving and innovation rather than repetitive tasks.

  • AI Agents & the Agentic Web: Microsoft introduced over 50 AI tools to build the agentic web, where AI agents autonomously complete tasks, collaborate, and make decisions with minimal human intervention.

  • GitHub Copilot Evolves: GitHub Copilot now functions as an autonomous coding agent, capable of refactoring code, fixing defects, and implementing new features independently.

  • Enterprise AI Expansion: Microsoft launched Azure AI Foundry, enabling businesses to develop multi-agent AI workflows, integrating memory, reasoning, and open protocols for scalable AI solutions.

  • Microsoft’s push toward autonomous AI agents signals a fundamental shift in how businesses and developers interact with technology. By moving beyond reactive AI assistants to proactive, decision-making agents, Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a future where AI doesn’t just assist - it anticipates, strategizes, and executes complex workflows. What will humans do then? Govern the responses?

  • Enterprise AI Expansion: H20.Ai introduced h2oGPTe, a platform designed for secure, auditable, and scalable AI deployments, integrating with Dell AI Factory and NVIDIA for enterprise-grade AI solutions.

  • Hybrid & On-Prem AI Agents: The latest updates enable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), role-based access control, and PII detection, making AI adoption more compliant and controllable for banks, telecoms, and governments.

  • Secure Cloud Integration: H2O Managed Cloud now supports Amazon Bedrock, allowing enterprises to connect AI models securely within their own VPC, ensuring full data and model control.

  • AI-Powered Deepfake Detection: Google launched the SynthID Detector Portal, allowing users to scan files uploaded to Google Photos for AI-generated content using SynthID watermarks.

  • Robust Yet Limited Protection: The watermarking system is resistant to basic digital manipulation, but remains vulnerable to minor alterations, such as text edits or added comments.

  • Expanding AI Detection Efforts: While the tool currently identifies content from Gemini AI, Veoh, and Lyria, broader adoption across platforms like ChatGPT remains a challenge.

  • AI-Powered Workflow Automation: Microsoft introduced Agent Loop, a new capability within Azure Logic Apps that enables developers to build AI agents directly into enterprise workflows.

  • Multi-Agent & Autonomous AI: The feature allows businesses to create autonomous AI agents for tasks like loan approvals, customer support, and IT operations, leveraging over 1,400 Logic Apps connectors.

  • Enterprise-Grade AI Integration: Agent Loop provides observability, governance, and security, ensuring AI agents can reason, act, and learn while maintaining compliance within enterprise environments.

  • AI Coding Leadership: Anthropic unveiled Claude 4 Opus, claiming it as the world’s best AI model for coding, capable of executing thousands of steps over hours without losing focus.

  • Hybrid Model Advancements: The new Claude Sonnet 4 replaces Sonnet 3.7, offering improved coding abilities and better adherence to instructions, while both models now integrate reasoning with web search and external tools.

  • Enhanced Safety & Transparency: Due to its power, Claude 4 Opus required additional safety mitigations, and Anthropic is shifting its models’ reasoning mechanics to provide summaries of thought processes rather than documenting each step.

  • CEPM - Cloud Efficiency Posture Management

  • Beyond Traditional Cost Management: CEPM shifts cloud optimization from financial reporting to engineering-led efficiency, embedding proactive monitoring into workflows.

  • DeepWaste Technology: PointFive’s proprietary DeepWaste™ analyzes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments to uncover inefficiencies missed by conventional tools.

  • Enterprise Adoption & Multi-Cloud Optimization: Companies like Blackhawk Network, E.ON, and Elastic report rapid ROI, with CEPM simplifying multi-cloud efficiency management.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

  • Google updated its iconic logo for the first time in 10 years to align with its AI chatbot, Gemini. The redesign replaces the traditional four-tone ‘G’ logo with a rainbow gradient, blending the original red, yellow, green, and blue shades.

    The change reflects Google’s increased focus on AI, integrating the technology across its platforms to stay competitive in the evolving AI landscape. The new logo first appeared on the Google Search app for iOS, followed by Android devices, and will eventually roll out across all platforms

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

  • happy for my buddies over here! See you at OWASP!

  • congrats guys!

CrowdStrike | Layoff

Microsoft | Layoff

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

Return on SecurityYour weekly 5-minute briefing on the cybersecurity market, providing key trends and analysis. The business of the cyber industry with zero fluff.
Latio PulseThe Latest in Product Security Delivered Weekly

Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!

What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.

Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.

Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.

Key areas of focus for me are:

  1. Cloud Computing, Security, Trends

  2. Developer & Security Tools

  3. Networking & Infrastructure Tools

  4. End User Tools & Workspace Tech

  5. Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts

^These used to be key areas. Now it’s just all AI.

If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!

Thank you for reading and stay digitally and physically safe!

Phil

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