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HPE-Juniper deal clears DOJ hurdle, but settlement requires divestitures

In HPE’s press release following the court’s decision, the vendor wrote that “After close, HPE will facilitate limited access to Juniper’s advanced Mist AIOps technology.” In addition, the DOJ stated that the settlement requires HPE to divest its Instant On business and mandates that the merged firm license critical Juniper software to independent competitors. Specifically, HPE must divest its global Instant On campus and branch WLAN business, including all assets, intellectual property, R&D personnel, and customer relationships, to a DOJ-approved buyer within 180 days. Instant On is aimed primarily at the SMB arena and offers a cloud-based package of wired and wireless networking gear that’s designed for so-called out-of-the-box installation and minimal IT involvement, according to HPE. HPE and Juniper focused on the positive in reacting to the settlement. “Our agreement with the DOJ paves the way to close HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks and preserves the intended benefits of this deal for our customers and shareholders, while creating greater competition in the global networking market,” HPE CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement. “For the first time, customers will now have a modern network architecture alternative that can best support the demands of AI workloads. The combination of HPE Aruba Networking and Juniper Networks will provide customers with a comprehensive portfolio of secure, AI-native networking solutions, and accelerate HPE’s ability to grow in the AI data center, service provider and cloud segments.” “This marks an exciting step forward in delivering on a critical customer need – a complete portfolio of modern, secure networking solutions to connect their organizations and provide essential foundations for hybrid cloud and AI,” said Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim. “We look forward to closing this transaction and turning our shared vision into reality for enterprise, service provider and cloud customers.”

Identity theft hits 1.1M reports — and authentication fatigue is only getting worse

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more From passwords to passkeys to a veritable alphabet soup of other options — second-factor authentication (2FA)/one-time passwords (OTP), multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), silent network authentication (SNA) — when it comes to a preeminent or even preferred type of identity authentication, there is little consensus among businesses or customers. What there is agreement on, however, is the necessity of these tools. The FIDO Alliance found that more than half of customers (53%) saw an increase in suspicious messages and online scams in 2024. This was largely driven through SMS, email and phone calls, and was only exacerbated by advancements in AI. Even at a time when we continue to see staggering increases in fraud and related losses — the Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.1 million reports of identity theft last year alone — businesses must do their best to walk a tightrope between robust security and effortless convenience. Over-index on either and you risk alienating customers — too few hoops and you lose their trust, too many and you lose their patience. So, how do businesses strike this fragile balance and implement effective authentication solutions? The customer is always right When it comes to authentication, what businesses decree to employees rarely translates to customers. We transitioned to WebAuthn as the only form of 2FA for employee authentication, a company-wide mandate that took a few weeks. This ‘forced adoption’ works when your employees don’t have a choice, but your customers do. Recently, I wanted to book a hotel for my family vacation, so I went to my favorite travel site, found the perfect room at a reasonable rate, and went to finalize the transaction. One

Borouge Partners with Honeywell to Develop Autonomous Operations in UAE

Abu Dhabi-based petrochemicals company Borouge PLC has partnered with Honeywell to conduct a proof of concept for AI-powered autonomous operations. The company said in a media release that this collaboration has the potential to revolutionize its UAE plant operations. The collaboration between Borouge and Honeywell is set to deliver the petrochemical industry’s first AI-driven control room designed for full-scale, real-time operation, establishing a new standard for the future of AI in petrochemicals, Borouge said. “Borouge’s AI, Digitalization, and Technology (AIDT) transformation program is setting new standards in operations, innovation, and business performance. By collaborating with global AI leaders such as Honeywell, we are accelerating growth, driving efficiency, and enhancing shareholder value. This project further strengthens Borouge’s competitive edge as we continue to deliver on our ambitious AIDT roadmap,” Hazeem Sultan Al Suwaidi, Chief Executive Officer of Borouge, said. The companies agreed to bring their expertise in process technology and autonomous control capabilities to identify new opportunities to deploy Agentic AI solutions and advanced machine learning algorithms, Borouge said. “Our collaboration with Borouge is a clear example of how joint efforts can accelerate innovation across industry. By integrating AI and automation technologies into core operations, we are helping unlock new levels of efficiency, safety, and performance. This agreement shows how advanced technologies, applied with purpose, can reshape industrial operations at scale”, George Bou Mitri, President of Honeywell Industrial Automation in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Central Asia, said. Borogue said the initiative seeks to implement proof-of-concept technologies that will improve its operations across its Ruwais facilities in the UAE. By embracing autonomous operations, Borouge said it can optimize production, cut energy consumption, and boost safety, all while driving down costs, at what will be the world’s largest petrochemical site. Borouge expects its AIDT program to bring in $575 million in

From hallucinations to hardware: Lessons from a real-world computer vision project gone sideways

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Computer vision projects rarely go exactly as planned, and this one was no exception. The idea was simple: Build a model that could look at a photo of a laptop and identify any physical damage — things like cracked screens, missing keys or broken hinges. It seemed like a straightforward use case for image models and large language models (LLMs), but it quickly turned into something more complicated. Along the way, we ran into issues with hallucinations, unreliable outputs and images that were not even laptops. To solve these, we ended up applying an agentic framework in an atypical way — not for task automation, but to improve the model’s performance. In this post, we will walk through what we tried, what didn’t work and how a combination of approaches eventually helped us build something reliable. Where we started: Monolithic prompting Our initial approach was fairly standard for a multimodal model. We used a single, large prompt to pass an image into an image-capable LLM and asked it to identify visible damage. This monolithic prompting strategy is simple to implement and works decently for clean, well-defined tasks. But real-world data rarely plays along. We ran into three major issues early on: Hallucinations: The model would sometimes invent damage that did not exist or mislabel what it was seeing. Junk image detection: It had no reliable way to flag images that were not even laptops, like pictures of desks, walls or people occasionally slipped through and received nonsensical damage reports. Inconsistent accuracy: The combination of these problems made the model too unreliable for operational use. This was the point when it became clear we would need to iterate.

ICYMI: ENERGY SECRETARY: It’s Time to Stop Subsidizing Solar and Wind in Perpuity

New York Post June 27, 2025 “How the Big Beautiful Bill will lower energy costs, shore up the electric grid — and unleash American prosperity” By Chris Wright How much would you pay for an Uber if you didn’t know when it would pick you up or where it was going to drop you off? Probably not much. Yet this is the same effect that variable generation sources like wind and solar have on our power grids. You never know if these energy sources will actually be able to produce electricity when you need it — because you don’t know if the sun will be shining or the wind blowing. Even so, the federal government has subsidized these sources for decades, resulting in higher electricity prices and a less stable grid. . . . President Donald Trump knows what to do: Eliminate green tax credits from the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, including those for wind and solar power. The One Big Beautiful Bill seeks to do that: Along with other proposals, like canceling billions in Biden Green New Deal money and making much-needed investments in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, it aims to set an aggressive end date for these subsidies and build on the president’s push for affordable, abundant, and secure energy for the nation. . . . As Secretary of Energy — and someone who’s devoted his life to advancing energy innovation to better human lives — I, too, know how these Green New Deal subsidies are fleecing Americans. Wind and solar subsidies have been particularly wasteful and counterproductive. One example: The Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit was first introduced in 1992, when wind energy was a nascent industry. This tax credit, originally set to phase out in 1999, was sold on a promise of low-cost energy with

AI agents are hitting a liability wall. Mixus has a plan to overcome it using human overseers on high-risk workflows

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more While enterprises face the challenges of deploying AI agents in critical applications, a new, more pragmatic model is emerging that puts humans back in control as a strategic safeguard against AI failure. One such example is Mixus, a platform that uses a “colleague-in-the-loop” approach to make AI agents reliable for mission-critical work. This approach is a response to the growing evidence that fully autonomous agents are a high-stakes gamble. The high cost of unchecked AI The problem of AI hallucinations has become a tangible risk as companies explore AI applications. In a recent incident, the AI-powered code editor Cursor saw its own support bot invent a fake policy restricting subscriptions, sparking a wave of public customer cancellations. Similarly, the fintech company Klarna famously reversed course on replacing customer service agents with AI after admitting the move resulted in lower quality. In a more alarming case, New York City’s AI-powered business chatbot advised entrepreneurs to engage in illegal practices, highlighting the catastrophic compliance risks of unmonitored agents. These incidents are symptoms of a larger capability gap. According to a May 2025 Salesforce research paper, today’s leading agents succeed only 58% of the time on single-step tasks and just 35% of the time on multi-step ones, highlighting “a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the multifaceted demands of real-world enterprise scenarios.” The colleague-in-the-loop model To bridge this gap, a new approach focuses on structured human oversight. “An AI agent should act at your direction and on your behalf,” Mixus co-founder Elliot Katz told VentureBeat. “But without built-in organizational oversight, fully autonomous agents often create more problems than they solve.” This philosophy underpins Mixus’s colleague-in-the-loop model, which embeds human

HPE-Juniper deal clears DOJ hurdle, but settlement requires divestitures

Identity theft hits 1.1M reports — and authentication fatigue is only getting worse

Borouge Partners with Honeywell to Develop Autonomous Operations in UAE

From hallucinations to hardware: Lessons from a real-world computer vision project gone sideways

ICYMI: ENERGY SECRETARY: It’s Time to Stop Subsidizing Solar and Wind in Perpuity

AI agents are hitting a liability wall. Mixus has a plan to overcome it using human overseers on high-risk workflows

Borouge Partners with Honeywell to Develop Autonomous Operations in UAE

ICYMI: ENERGY SECRETARY: It’s Time to Stop Subsidizing Solar and Wind in Perpuity

FERC’s Christie calls for dispatchable resources after grid operators come ‘close to the edge’

The ability of Midcontinent and East Coast grid operators to narrowly handle this week’s extreme heat and humidity without blackouts reflects the urgent need to ensure the United States has adequate power supplies, according to Mark Christie, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “We’re simply not building generation fast enough, and we’re not keeping generation that we need to keep,” Christie said Thursday during a media briefing after the agency’s open meeting. “Some of our systems really came close to the edge.” The PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator, hit a peak load of about 161 GW on Monday, nearly 5% above its 154 GW peak demand forecast for this summer and the highest demand on its system since 2011. The grid operator had about 10 GW to spare at the peak, according to Christie. At that peak, PJM’s fuel mix included gas at about 44%, nuclear at 20%, coal at 19%, solar at 5% and wind at 4%, according to Christie. Also, PJM told Christie that demand response was “essential” at reducing load, he said. PJM used nearly 4,000 MW of demand response to reduce its load, according to FERC Commissioner Judy Chang. “I see load flexibility as a key tool for grid operators to meet the challenges that we face,” Chang said. PJM called on demand response resources on Monday in its mid-Atlantic and Dominion regions, on Tuesday across its footprint and on Wednesday in its eastern zones, according to Dan Lockwood, a PJM spokesman. PJM was within its reserve requirements, but used DR to provide additional resources for the grid, he said in an email. Resource adequacy is the “central issue” facing the U.S., according to Christie, who said blackouts during the extreme heat could have been deadly. “You never know about the next time,

New York Gov. Hochul hints at ‘fleet-style approach’ to nuclear deployments

Dive Brief: New York could take a page from Ontario’s playbook and deploy multiple reactors to reach and possibly exceed the 1-GW target Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Monday, analysts with Clean Air Task Force said in an interview. Whether the New York Power Authority ultimately selects a large light-water reactor like the Westinghouse AP1000 or multiple units of a small modular design like the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, lessons learned on recent and ongoing nuclear builds could translate to lower final costs, said John Carlson, CATF’s senior Northeast regional policy manager. That could enable a “fleet-style approach” to deployment similar to Ontario Power Generation’s plan to build four 300-MW BWRX-300 reactors in sequence, lowering the final cost per unit, said Victor Ibarra, senior manager for CATF’s advanced nuclear energy program. On Monday, Hochul said the plan would “allow for future collaboration with other states and Ontario.” Dive Insight: Gov. Hochul on Monday directed NYPA and the New York Department of Public Service “to develop at least one new nuclear energy facility with a combined capacity of no less than one gigawatt of electricity, either alone or in partnership with private entities,” in upstate New York. As governor, Hochul has considerable influence over NYPA, the state-owned electric utility. In February, for example, she “demand[ed]” NYPA suspend a proposed rate hike. Hochul’s announcement made no mention of specific reactor types or designs, but the suggestion that multiple plants could be in the offing suggests NYPA could consider small modular designs alongside a large light-water reactor, Ibarra said. “It’s good that they’re taking a minute to explore both options,” Carlson said. “I don’t think they know which one is most beneficial yet.” Hochul said NYPA would immediately begin evaluating “technologies, business models and locations” for the first plant. The preconstruction process will

Dangote Plans to List Africa’s Biggest Oil Refinery by Next Year

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person, plans a stock listing for his Nigerian crude oil refinery by the end of next year to widen the company’s investor base. The billionaire also plans this year to list the group’s urea plant, which has a capacity to produce 2.8 million tons of the crop nutrient per annum, Dangote told the African Export-Import Bank’s annual general meeting in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Friday. The oil facility can processes 650,000 barrels of crude a day, making it the continent’s biggest refinery. Nigeria’s downstream regulator and fuel marketers have accused Dangote of seeking to become a monopoly with his new refinery. A listing — through an initial public offering — could help woo investors including state-owned pension funds. The $20 billion Dangote Refinery outside the commercial hub Lagos, which became operational last year, currently produces aviation fuel, naphtha, diesel and gasoline. Monopoly Accusation It’s “important to list the refinery so that people will not be calling us a monopoly,” Dangote said. “They will now say we have shares, so let everybody have a part of it.” The tycoon, who had planned to start construction of a 5,000 ton steel plant after completing the refinery, last year scrapped the proposal because of the allegations. Dangote earlier this year said his group is on track to generate total revenue of $30 billion in 2026. On Friday, he said that the company plans to surpass Qatar as the world’s biggest exporter of urea within four years. The facility currently exports 37% of its output to the US. WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.

Energy Department Withdraws from Biden-Era Columbia River System Memorandum of Understanding

WASHINGTON— U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced that the Department of Energy in coordination with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the Departments of Commerce and the Interior and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has officially withdrawn from the Columbia River System Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Today’s action follows President Trump’s Memorandum directing the federal government to halt the Biden Administration’s radical Columbia River basin policy and will ensure Americans living in the Pacific Northwest can continue to rely on affordable hydropower from the Lower Snake River dams to help meet their growing power needs. “The Pacific Northwest deserves energy security, not energy scarcity. Dams in the Columbia River Basin have provided affordable and reliable electricity to millions of American families and businesses for decades,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, American taxpayer dollars will not be spent dismantling critical infrastructure, reducing our energy-generating capacity or on radical nonsense policies that dramatically raise prices on the American people. This Administration will continue to protect America’s critical energy infrastructure and ensure reliable, affordable power for all Americans.” BACKGROUND: On June 10, 2025, President Trump signed the Presidential Memorandum, Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin, revoking the prior Presidential Memorandum, Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead, and Other Native Fish Populations in the Columbia River Basin, part of the radical green energy agenda calling for “equitable treatment for fish.” The Biden-era MOU required the federal government to spend over $1 billion and comply with 36 pages of costly, onerous commitments aimed at replacing services provided by the Lower Snake River Dams and advancing the possibility of breaching them. Breaching the dams would have doubled the region’s risk of power shortages, driven wholesale electricity rates up by as much

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters sell for £45m

Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters have been sold in a deal worth £45 million. The CNOOC, Apache and Taqa buildings at the Prime Four business park in Kingswells have been acquired by EEH Ventures. The trio of buildings, totalling 275,000 sq ft, were previously owned by Canadian firm BMO. The financial services powerhouse first bought the buildings in 2014 but took the decision to sell the buildings as part of a “long-standing strategy to reduce their office exposure across the UK”. The deal was the largest to take place throughout Scotland during the last quarter of 2024. Trio of buildings snapped up London headquartered EEH Ventures was founded in 2013 and owns a number of residential, offices, shopping centres and hotels throughout the UK. All three Kingswells-based buildings were pre-let, designed and constructed by Aberdeen property developer Drum in 2012 on a 15-year lease. © Supplied by CBREThe Aberdeen headquarters of Taqa. Image: CBRE The North Sea headquarters of Middle-East oil firm Taqa has previously been described as “an amazing success story in the Granite City”. Taqa announced in 2023 that it intends to cease production from all of its UK North Sea platforms by the end of 2027. Meanwhile, Apache revealed at the end of last year it is planning to exit the North Sea by the end of 2029 blaming the windfall tax. The US firm first entered the North Sea in 2003 but will wrap up all of its UK operations by 2030. Aberdeen big deals The Prime Four acquisition wasn’t the biggest Granite City commercial property sale of 2024. American private equity firm Lone Star bought Union Square shopping centre from Hammerson for £111m. © ShutterstockAberdeen city centre. Hammerson, who also built the property, had originally been seeking £150m. BP’s North Sea headquarters in Stoneywood, Aberdeen, was also sold. Manchester-based

2025 ransomware predictions, trends, and how to prepare

Zscaler ThreatLabz research team has revealed critical insights and predictions on ransomware trends for 2025. The latest Ransomware Report uncovered a surge in sophisticated tactics and extortion attacks. As ransomware remains a key concern for CISOs and CIOs, the report sheds light on actionable strategies to mitigate risks. Top Ransomware Predictions for 2025: ● AI-Powered Social Engineering: In 2025, GenAI will fuel voice phishing (vishing) attacks. With the proliferation of GenAI-based tooling, initial access broker groups will increasingly leverage AI-generated voices; which sound more and more realistic by adopting local accents and dialects to enhance credibility and success rates. ● The Trifecta of Social Engineering Attacks: Vishing, Ransomware and Data Exfiltration. Additionally, sophisticated ransomware groups, like the Dark Angels, will continue the trend of low-volume, high-impact attacks; preferring to focus on an individual company, stealing vast amounts of data without encrypting files, and evading media and law enforcement scrutiny. ● Targeted Industries Under Siege: Manufacturing, healthcare, education, energy will remain primary targets, with no slowdown in attacks expected. ● New SEC Regulations Drive Increased Transparency: 2025 will see an uptick in reported ransomware attacks and payouts due to new, tighter SEC requirements mandating that public companies report material incidents within four business days. ● Ransomware Payouts Are on the Rise: In 2025 ransom demands will most likely increase due to an evolving ecosystem of cybercrime groups, specializing in designated attack tactics, and collaboration by these groups that have entered a sophisticated profit sharing model using Ransomware-as-a-Service. To combat damaging ransomware attacks, Zscaler ThreatLabz recommends the following strategies. ● Fighting AI with AI: As threat actors use AI to identify vulnerabilities, organizations must counter with AI-powered zero trust security systems that detect and mitigate new threats. ● Advantages of adopting a Zero Trust architecture: A Zero Trust cloud security platform stops

Identity theft hits 1.1M reports — and authentication fatigue is only getting worse

From hallucinations to hardware: Lessons from a real-world computer vision project gone sideways

AI agents are hitting a liability wall. Mixus has a plan to overcome it using human overseers on high-risk workflows

CTGT wins Best Presentation Style award at VB Transform 2025

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more San Francisco-based CTGT, a startup focused on making AI more trustworthy through feature-level model customization, won the Best Presentation Style award at VB Transform 2025 in San Francisco. Founded by 23-year-old Cyril Gorlla, the company showcased how its technology helps enterprises overcome AI trust barriers by directly modifying model features instead of using traditional fine-tuning or prompt engineering methods. During his presentation, Gorlla highlighted the “AI Doom Loop” faced by many enterprises: 54% of businesses cite AI as their highest tech risk according to Deloitte, while McKinsey reports 44% of organizations have experienced negative consequences from AI implementation. “A large part of this conference has been about the AI doom loop” Gorlla explained during his presentation. “Unfortunately, a lot of these [AI investments] don’t pan out. J&J just canceled hundreds of AI pilots because they didn’t really deliver ROI due to no fundamental trust in these systems.” Breaking the AI compute wall CTGT’s approach represents a significant departure from conventional AI customization techniques. The company was founded on research Gorlla conducted while holding an endowed chair at the University of California San Diego. In 2023, Gorlla published a paper at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) describing a method for evaluating and training AI models that was up to 500 times faster than existing approaches while achieving “three nines” (99.9%) of accuracy. Rather than relying on brute-force scaling or traditional deep learning methods, CTGT has developed what it calls an “entirely new AI stack” that fundamentally reimagines how neural networks learn. The company’s innovation focuses on understanding and intervening at the feature level of AI models. The company’s approach differs fundamentally from standard interpretability solutions that

Catio wins ‘coolest tech’ award at VB Transform 2025

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Palo Alto-based Catio was awarded “Coolest Technology” at VentureBeat Transform 2025 in San Francisco on Wednesday. Founded in 2023, the company has raised $7 million to date, with a recent $3 million round announced in March. Catio was also a finalist and presented at VB Transform’s Innovation Showcase in 2024. Catio’s AI Copilot for Tech Architecture reframes architecture as a living system—one that can be codified, introspected and intelligently evolved. By combining a real-time architectural map with a multi-agent AI organization, the solution helps engineering teams shift from reactive decision-making to continuous, proactive architecture excellence. VentureBeat spoke with co-founder and CEO Boris Bogatin and product lead Adam Kirsh about their team and the company’s technology following the announcement of winners at Transform. “We’re a team of serial entrepreneurs and tech leaders who’ve all shared a deep personal problem,” Bogatin said. “While finance folks and developers all have tools, CTOs, architects, and developers all plan and optimize stacks on whiteboards and ad hoc spreadsheets. And we’re changing that with Catio.” Catio is far more than a digital whiteboard for CTOs—it’s a reimagining of how architecture is understood, managed and evolved. The platform serves as a digital twin for your tech stack, offering continuous architecture visibility to inform more well-informed, data-driven architecture decisions. Designed to address the escalating complexity of modern tech stacks—including cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, monitoring and data pipelines—the platform replaces static diagrams and ad hoc snapshots with an interactive, high-fidelity system model. With Catio, architecture becomes a living, codified system—constantly updated, evaluated and advised by a network of intelligent AI agents. From static diagrams to living systems As an AI-driven tech stack copilot for technical leaders

Retail Resurrection: David’s Bridal bets its future on AI after double bankruptcy

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Inside a new David’s Bridal store in Delray Beach, Florida, a bride-to-be carefully taps images on a 65-inch touchscreen, curating a vision board for her wedding. Behind the scenes, an AI system automatically analyzes her selections, building a knowledge graph that will match her with vendors, recommend products and generate a personalized wedding plan. For the overwhelmed bride facing 300-plus wedding planning tasks, this AI assistant promises to automate the process: suggesting what to do next, reorganizing timelines when plans change and eliminating the need to manually update spreadsheets that inevitably break when wedding plans evolve. That’s the vision David’s Bridal is racing to fully implement with Pearl Planner, its new beta AI-powered wedding planning platform. For the twice-bankrupt retailer, this technology-driven transformation represents a high-stakes bet that AI can accomplish what traditional retail strategies couldn’t: Survival in an industry where 15,000 stores are projected to close this year alone. David’s Bridal is hardly alone in the dramatic and ongoing wave of store closures, bankruptcies and disruptions sweeping through the U.S. retail industry since the mid-2010s. Dubbed the “retail apocalypse,” there were at least 133 major retail bankruptcies and 57,000 store closures between 2018 and 2024. The company narrowly survived liquidation in its second bankruptcy in 2023 when business development company CION Investment Corporation — which has more than $6.1 billion in assets and a portfolio of 100 companies — acquired substantially all of its assets and invested $20 million in new funding. David’s AI-led transformation is driven from the top down by new CEO Kelly Cook, who originally joined the company as CMO in 2019. Her vision of taking the company from “aisle to algorithm” led her

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