By: David Marshall
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries and redefine the boundaries of what’s possible in technology, AI Appreciation Day serves as a vital moment to pause and recognize the profound impact that AI has had on our world. This annual observance, celebrated on July 16th, provides an opportunity for technology professionals, businesses, and enthusiasts to reflect on the remarkable advances in artificial intelligence and acknowledge the brilliant minds driving innovation forward.
AI Appreciation Day isn’t just about celebrating the technology itself-it’s about honoring the researchers, developers, data scientists, and visionaries who have transformed AI from science fiction into an integral part of our daily lives. From revolutionizing healthcare diagnostics and autonomous vehicles to enhancing cybersecurity and streamlining business operations, artificial intelligence has become the cornerstone of digital transformation across virtually every sector.
At VMblog, we’re marking this special day by bringing together insights from leading industry experts who are at the forefront of AI development and implementation. These technology leaders share their perspectives on AI’s most significant achievements, current challenges, and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead. Their commentary offers a comprehensive view of where artificial intelligence stands today and where it’s headed tomorrow.
Join us as we celebrate AI Appreciation Day 2025 with expert analysis, industry insights, and a look at the innovations that continue to push the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve.
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Nick Burling, SVP of Product at Nasuni
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved from a futuristic concept to a practical enabler of innovation across global industries, AI Appreciation Day acts as a timely reminder that while AI’s potential is thrilling, its promise can only be realized when built on a solid foundation of trusted, high-quality data. As every IT leader is under immense pressure to fast-track AI initiatives, rushing implementation without first establishing centralized, accurate, and accessible data infrastructure risks introducing security risk, bias, inaccuracies, and delays in ROI.
With recent data finding that while 92% of enterprises have AI budgets, only 20% feel their data is AI ready, and only 27% of AI projects showing measurable ROI, organizations need to reflect on their data maturity and the readiness of their infrastructure. Prioritizing a strong data foundation, through a hybrid cloud architecture for example, not only unifies fragmented data across silos, but ensures that AI systems are trained on the most current and reliable information and creating the most accurate output— a necessary component for AI’s success.
True appreciation for AI means recognizing that the magic of agentic AI, machine learning and other AI powered innovations start with disciplined data management and a commitment to the foundational work that will make AI responsible and impactful.
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Manasi Vartak, Chief AI Architect at Cloudera
AI Appreciation Day is a chance for us to reflect on how far AI has come, and more importantly, how thoughtfully we need to use it moving forward. With AI adoption surging towards 378 million users this year, we’re reminded of just how many people in various industries are using AI to grow their businesses, make informed decisions, and deliver better customer experiences.
Whatever the task may be, the most effective models need to be trained using trusted data. The option to use a private AI model is becoming one of the most secure ways to ensure accurate models. Since they’re used strictly within an organization, the models can provide real-time insights without compromising data privacy or compliance.
With AI continuously evolving, the difference between good and great results will come down to the responsibility of the companies handling their data. The most valuable insights come from sensitive data, which must be protected. That’s why it’s important for AI security to be a top priority. With the spirit of AI Appreciation Day, it’s obvious that the future of responsible AI lies in the hands of innovators.
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Ojas Rege, SVP & GM, Privacy and Data Governance at OneTrust
This AI Appreciation Day, I’m thinking about what it means to future-proof AI from an enterprise perspective to ensure that you don’t make mistakes in the development and deployment of AI systems that come back to haunt you later. But how do you future-proof a technology that is evolving at such an incredible pace? It is a big question, so let’s focus on the data layer and how you can design for the long-term value from the start. Three tips for future-proofing your AI-ready data strategy:
- First-party data— Garbage in, garbage out. So, of course data quality is central to AI-driven outcomes. In addition, differentiated data will lead to differentiated outcomes. For AI systems focused on customer-facing experiences like personalization, audience creation, and loyalty, companies with compelling first-party data collected directly from their customers and prospects will have a competitive advantage over those that rely only on third-party data. First-party consented data is a powerful asset and those that start building their data sets early will build long-term advantage into their go-to-market business processes.
- Privacy by design— All development organizations know that the earlier you find a software bug, the less expensive it is to fix and the less negative customer impact it has. Pain increases exponentially the longer you wait. Data privacy must be built into data architectures from the beginning because if, for example, you use personal information to train models and realize later that you shouldn’t have, the only solution is to roll back the model, which creates tremendous pain for the business.
- Big rocks— Every line of code, every data set, and every business process will be touched by AI. The ubiquity of AI and the pace of its evolution make it difficult to have a comprehensive governance approach. The practical starting point is to look at the core business model of your company and identify the three data initiatives most critical to that business model. Those are the “big rocks” on which to focus your governance and AI-ready data strategy. Future-proofing as best you can for those will protect the business. You will design a governance gradient by going deep where value and risk are high and moving quickly where they are low.
Finally, don’t build your program around specific laws, especially with so much regulatory ambiguity. Instead, anchor governance to the pillars of your business model so you can move forward with C-level commitment. On AI Appreciation Day, we must think of the long-term. We must govern well AND move fast. Doing just one or the other is not a viable option for creating long-term value for your business.
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Michael Gray, Chief Technology Officer at Thrive
AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder not just to recognize the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, but to reflect on what’s required to actually realize its value. AI adoption isn’t just a technology play; it’s a data readiness challenge. While many organizations are intrigued by concepts like agentic AI, they have yet to take the foundational steps needed to adopt these technologies responsibly and effectively. Most companies do not have a clear AI strategy in place, and even fewer are confident in their ability to move pilots into production.
The companies that are finding success with AI have one thing in common: they ask the right questions from the start. What business process are we trying to improve? Do we have the right data to power this use case—secure, governed, and fit for purpose? Who owns the outputs, and how do we ensure accountability? Without governance, management, and clear structure around AI agents, even the most promising pilot will stall.
And as we deepen our reliance on AI, we can’t forget the cybersecurity implications. We’re entering a reality where we’ll have to fight AI with AI. Threat actors are already automating the low-hanging fruit. If organizations want to stay ahead, they’ll need to do the same and use AI to offload menial security tasks to free up talent for what matters most. But again, success depends on having the right data infrastructure and guardrails in place. Success with AI means seizing the opportunity and owning the responsibility.
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Aaron Fulkerson, CEO at OPAQUE
This AI Appreciation Day, we shouldn’t just celebrate innovation, we must recommit to responsibility.
We’re witnessing the Internet’s next epochal shift: from a human-driven web to an agentic Internet, where machines communicate, transact, and take action, often beyond human line of sight. This shift introduces urgent new risks: data exhaust, autonomous agent chains, and the erosion of proprietary control.
In this new reality, trust can no longer be assumed. It must be cryptographically enforced.To protect what matters, sensitive data, enterprise IP, and individual rights, we must embed trust directly into the fabric of AI itself.
By safeguarding data in use, enforcing policies at runtime, and producing verifiable outcomes, we can ensure AI agents serve our intent, not circumvent it.
We have a collective obligation to build the trust layer for this next generation of the Internet. It will take bold collaboration across the ecosystem, researchers, developers, partners, to ensure we can appreciate AI as a force for human progress, not a systemic vulnerability.
The future of AI will be fast and powerful, but above all, must be trustworthy.
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Miya McClain, VP of Product Management at Smartsheet
AI has already proven to be a powerful tool for individual productivity, enabling workers to solve complex problems more efficiently. As we mark AI Appreciation Day, it’s important to recognize that individual productivity has limitations-in order to fully realize the benefits of AI, organizations need to leverage company-centric solutions that can scale across teams and workstreams. Individually-focused tools may provide an initial surge in productivity, but they need to be able to scale those productivity gains as headcount increases, once siloed teams unite and business scales. To provide organizations with tools that realize the full benefits of AI, leaders should look to enterprise-grade solutions that can scale alongside the business rather than stall the process.
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Chaim Mazal, Chief Security Officer at Gigamon
AI Appreciation Day is a moment to recognize just how AI has transformed our everyday lives, helping us work smarter and solve problems more efficiently. From boosting productivity to unlocking new capabilities across organizations, the potential of AI and autonomous systems is undeniable. But while we celebrate how far AI has come, its full value will only be realized if we can govern and secure it with the complete visibility needed to truly understand how it operates across infrastructures.
This is proving to be more difficult, as AI is adding new complexities to networks, expanding attack surfaces, and increasing security risks. In fact, research shows 1 in 3 organizations have already seen network traffic double from AI workloads alone. This explosion in data can overwhelm traditional security tools, obscuring visibility into how AI is behaving, and what information it’s accessing.
With the ongoing adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure and the increasing use of AI, the need for real-time visibility into all data in motion, including encrypted and lateral (East-West) traffic, has never been more urgent. Without it, companies are exposing themselves to unintended data leakage or even malicious misuse by AI agents.
On AI Appreciation Day, we’re reminded that progress and protection must go hand in hand. Key to that will be the best Security and IT talent to both innovate and govern AI use. The human element is a critical component to successful AI and must not be forgotten. Building a secure AI future means ensuring our teams are empowered to pair innovation with accountability and use network telemetry, data loss prevention, and deep observability to ensure that as AI gets smarter, we stay in control.
If we can see it, we can secure it, and that’s how we truly unlock AI’s full potential without opening ourselves up to devastating risk.
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Richard Robinson, CEO & founder of Robin AI
More lawyers are understanding that the documents they work on are rich sources of intelligence – because tools are coming on the market that let them see and mine that intelligence. This is a legal revolution, because our pre-existing legal system wasn’t built for speed for transparency; rather, it was built for those who could afford to wait, navigate the jargon, and pay the bill.
AI should be appreciated because it’s helping lawyers and paralegals be better at their jobs, and it will eventually open up the legal services to more of the people who need them. With the right safeguards, AI gives us the only opportunity in our lifetimes to rebuild our legal system for everyone, not just the privileged few. Legal is the only trillion dollar industry globally where no legal or tech firm has more than 1% market share. The race is one to break this mold, and it’s driving massive innovation. There are now ways to scale the knowledge and work approaches of the best lawyers, and cut down the drudge work that used to send thousands of lawyers running to other professions.
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Rodrigo Coutinho, Co-Founder and AI Product Manager at OutSystems
As teams grow more comfortable integrating AI into their workflows, the next evolution is agentic AI, where autonomous agents take on more complex responsibilities, independently interacting with systems and driving business decisions. It’s a fundamental change, not just in how software is built, but in who (or what) is building it. This AI Appreciation Day, we’re highlighting the need for control, visibility and governance, especially as provided by low-code platforms, which are best suited to support enterprises looking to make the shift to agentic and turn ideas into real, scalable systems.
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James Evans, Head of AI at Amplitude
AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that the most powerful applications of AI are the ones transforming how work gets done. At Amplitude, we believe the real value of AI is in making teams faster, more focused, and more effective at solving real-world customer problems.
For product, data and marketing teams, that means less time digging through dashboards or waiting on queries, and more time acting on what actually matters. AI should help teams cut through noise, find meaningful signals, and move from insight to impact without getting stuck in analysis paralysis.
This is the future we are building toward. A future where AI connects the dots across the entire customer journey, where data drives decisions, and where teams can move with the speed and clarity today’s digital products demand.
The promise of AI is not just about doing more. It’s about making better decisions, faster. And for us, that starts with building tools teams trust and use every day to create better experiences for their users.
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Patrick Harding, Chief Product Architect, Ping Identity
AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder of the incredible promise and growing complexity that AI brings to our digital world. From deepfakes to autonomous agents, AI has transformed the landscape of identity-based cyber threats, making it increasingly difficult to verify who, or what, is behind a digital interaction. Without the right safeguards, these technologies risk eroding the trust that underpins everything from financial services to healthcare. Yet AI is also a powerful tool for defense. When deployed responsibly, it can enhance real-time risk detection, behavioral analysis, and adaptive authentication, helping organizations prevent fraud while improving the user experience. As AI continues to evolve and agents become more autonomous, now is the time for organizations to rethink identity models, ensure secure delegation, and prepare systems to recognize and authenticate not just people, but the intelligent processes acting on their behalf. Building and maintaining trust in every digital interaction is more essential than ever, and organizations must ensure their identity strategies evolve in lockstep with the technology driving today’s transformation.
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Dr. Tina Nikoukhah, Director of Research at GetReal Security
One important area where generative AI raises significant concerns is the spread of synthetic content. As tools like deepfake generation services become easier to use and access, both good and bad actors are taking advantage-ultimately muddying the ability to determine whether content is natural or synthetic. This can lead to bad consequences not just for enterprises or governments, but for all individuals as well. Therefore, as these tools become more accessible, the need for tools that can accurately detect synthetic content and malicious deepfakes has never been greater.
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Ben Miller, SVP of Data Science & Analytics at Bonterra
As AI reshapes enterprise business at breakneck speed, it’s important to recognize that nonprofit and philanthropic organizations were also early adopters. As early as 2010, they used AI for things like donor segmentation and “optimizing asks” – custom-tailoring each donation request to increase potential giving.
Now, agentic AI will take “AI for good” even further. Between federal funding cuts and a surge in demand for services, nonprofits can use semiautonomous and autonomous agents to find the best grants, apply for them, and engage with supporters in more effective, scalable ways.
This AI Appreciation Day, we are not only reflecting on industry growth, but taking the time to recognize the communities AI can uplift when used for good. Utilizing AI doesn’t mean losing the human touch; it means the opposite. Agentic AI has the potential to make nonprofits even more human by handling time-intensive tasks so staff can focus on what they love most: building relationships in the community, developing strategy, and turning AI insights into impact.
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Cyndy Lobb, chief product officer, Forter
Across industries, AI is no longer just operating behind the scenes, and digital commerce is no exception. AI is stepping into the role of the shopper, acting autonomously on behalf of consumers to compare prices, initiate checkouts, redeem loyalty points, and more. With more power comes new risks. Brands must layer in trust and identity intelligence at every step of the journey, upgrading beyond traditional fraud defenses to validate non-human identities in real time. On AI Appreciation Day, it’s important to recognize that the future of commerce rests on responsible, outcome-driven AI innovation that preserves security, transparency, and trusted customer experiences.
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Andy Boyd, chief product officer, Appfire
AI is becoming a cornerstone of how organizations approach problem-solving and innovation, helping teams work more efficiently and make smarter decisions. Its ability to streamline workflows and uncover new insights continues to redefine what’s possible across industries. As adoption accelerates, we’re seeing AI not only optimize the way we work but also open doors to entirely new ways of thinking and creating. AI Appreciation Day is a perfect opportunity to celebrate these advancements while looking ahead to how this technology will further shape the way we work, create, and connect.
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Radha Basu, CEO and founder of iMerit
AI’s true potential goes beyond automating simple, low-level tasks. Foundational AI must be capable of independently solving complex societal challenges in healthcare, transportation, and technology. These high-stakes autonomous applications require precision, trust, and scalability. Today, developers are constrained by limited access to high-quality data and unsophisticated data tuning techniques. A new approach is needed to ensure the accuracy and scale that developers need to compete.
To move forward, we need to embed human expertise into every stage of AI development, especially in critical areas like cancer diagnostics, where accuracy is non-negotiable. This involves equipping knowledgeable domain experts with advanced tools to train, test, and validate AI under real-world conditions. It also involves matching human experts with the right meta-cognition required to challenge and improve the models. Facilitated through software-delivered services, this is how developers move up the value chain to autonomous AI, boosting innovation, reducing time to market, and fulfilling its significant potential.
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Greg Statton, VP of AI Solutions at Cohesity
AI is becoming a favorite tool of cybercriminals, but it also has the potential to be one of the greatest forces for good in cybersecurity, if we solve the data problem first. Too often, organizations rush to implement AI without ensuring their data is accurate, accessible, and resilient. That’s a recipe for risk, not insight. As the AI infrastructure space rapidly evolves, enterprise tech companies are doubling down on speed and scale. But, in highly regulated, security-critical environments, that’s not enough. Without strong data governance, control, and trust, even the fastest models introduce risk. The companies that will see success long-term are those that focus on building a foundation of secure, compliant, and resilient data.
At Cohesity, we believe the future of trusted AI hinges on data resilience. Secure, well-governed data is essential. That’s why we’re committed to helping organizations not only safeguard their data against modern threats but also unlock its full potential through AI-driven insights. By securing the foundation, we’re enabling the next era of cyber resilience, where AI helps teams detect, respond, and recover faster with confidence.
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Minh Nguyen, VP of Product, Identity at Entrust
AI is ushering in a new era of cybersecurity, with digital identity emerging as one of the most critical areas of innovation. As we conduct more of our lives online, remote identity verification, particularly Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, has become essential across industries, from regulated industries such as banking and financial services to non-regulated businesses such as retail, transportation, and healthcare.
However, AI is playing a dual role, as it is both the poison and the cure, the threat and the defence. AI is contributing to a surge in identity fraud attacks in terms of scale and sophistication. Deepfake attacks now occur at an average of 1 every 5 minutes, and digital document forgeries have risen by 244% year-over-year, while phishing attacks are becoming increasingly convincing. Yet, AI is also enabling powerful defences. It can detect fraud faster and more accurately, automate onboarding and compliance, and generate synthetic data to train AI systems to recognise emerging threats. These capabilities enable organisations to respond to attacks in real time and scale their defences as demand grows.
The duality is relevant as we mark AI Appreciation Day, to reflect on the transformative power of AI and the responsibility of it. Beyond the technology itself, it is also important to demystify AI and educate consumers. By fostering greater public understanding, individuals are empowered to engage with AI more confidently and support the adoption of new innovations. Only then can we truly unlock AI’s potential to protect digital identities and strengthen cybersecurity for everyone.
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Lars Maaløe, Co-Founder & CTO, at Corti
LLMs have reached unprecedented levels in reasoning capabilities, yet they remain factually wrong too often for proper use in critical domains like healthcare. As Yann LeCun notes, even small errors can compound exponentially over time-a reality that becomes dangerous when lives are at stake. What excites me most about this moment in AI is that we’re finally solving this fundamental tension: harnessing the remarkable reasoning power of LLMs while anchoring them to vast stores of factual medical data to maintain the accuracy that’s critical in healthcare.
The breakthrough comes from combining faster, more specialized AI with agentic reasoning systems that can access and validate against real-world clinical knowledge bases in real-time. Specialized medical reasoning engines demonstrate 35x faster inference compared to general-purpose models, with significantly reduced hallucination rates – but when you deploy these as agents that can dynamically query clinical databases, cross-reference patient histories, and validate decisions against medical literature, you get a leap ahead that transforms how AI operates in healthcare. This marriage of speed, specialization, and autonomous reasoning is what makes the year ahead so thrilling; we’re finally building AI agents that can think like clinicians while maintaining the precision that healthcare demands.
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Vincent Sunn Chen, VP & Founding Engineer at Snorkel AI
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the rapid progress of AI capabilities as we transition from generalist LLMs to specialized agents that can act autonomously, reason, and make trusted decisions. At the heart of this progress is the data: we’ve moved from public domain and crowdsourced internet data to specialized, expert-driven datasets that are driving the current frontier.
At the same time, the stakes for deploying agentic AI have increased. Enterprises are competing to maintain a competitive edge and demonstrate clear ROI with production agents. Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.
Closing the production gap will require specialized datasets that address the “jagged frontier” of real-world use cases across industries. Simply scaling “more data” will not be enough-successful AI deployments will require high-quality, curated datasets that address the right mixture of real-world, domain-specific scenarios.
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Munu Gandhi, President of IT Solutions at Xerox
This AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognize how far the technology has come and how quickly it is evolving from a behind-the-scenes tool into a true digital co-worker. At Xerox, we are focused on deploying agentic AI to handle high-volume, document-based tasks like contract reviews, IT support tickets, and finance workflows. These agents do more than wait for instructions; they anticipate needs, surface insights, and take action, helping us accelerate cycle times, improve visibility, and scale our services business. One of the most powerful advantages is their ability to bridge the gap between structured and unstructured data, aggregating information across formats to drive smarter decisions and boost productivity. However, unlocking AI’s full potential means training our human colleagues just as much as the models themselves. Teaching people how to collaborate with AI is as critical as deploying it, and that is how we will truly reinvent how work gets done.
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Sammy Ahmed, VP and General Manager, name.com
AI is changing how people create online. What used to require a full team and weeks of work can now happen in a single sitting. This shift is lowering barriers and making digital creation more accessible than ever. At name.com, we’re thinking about how domain infrastructure can support this change. For many, registering a domain is one of the final steps before launching something new. Our goal is to make that step faster, simpler, and more connected to the tools people are already using, whether that’s an AI builder, a prompt-based platform, or an agent-driven workflow. AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that this technology isn’t just about automation. It’s about enabling more people to build, share, and show up online in ways that feel true to them.
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Ram Mohan, Chief Strategy Officer, identity.digital
On AI Appreciation Day, we celebrate not only the remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence but also the critical digital infrastructure that powers this progress. The .ai domain has emerged as the go-to digital address for the world’s AI innovators. From nimble startups to industry giants and cutting-edge research labs, people and organizations are choosing .ai to signal their involvement in building new tools, exploring bold ideas, and pushing technology into practical, impactful solutions. In the past year, our close collaboration with the Government of Anguilla has transformed the .ai domain. We’ve introduced crucial improvements in security, enhanced accessibility, and rolled out features designed to make finding and using these names effortless. These upgrades have cemented .ai as a vital resource for the global AI community, creating new avenues for growth and opportunity in Anguilla. We are proud to champion a domain that represents the future of technology and, more importantly, helps turn groundbreaking ideas into real-world impact.
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Josh Lohr, Senior SEO Manager, Contentful
Generative AI is our new favorite audience here at Contentful. As AI fundamentally reshapes how people search for information – giving users direct answers to their questions rather than a list of links – it’s also changing how brands need to manage their content. While this shift brings real opportunities for consumers and brands alike, too often companies are chasing AI visibility without ensuring their content is accessible, well-structured, and grounded in credible data. The brands that will stand out are the ones that think of AI not just as a distribution channel but also as a content consumer or a brand persona. Investing in visibility, strong metadata, and a clear content architecture that speaks to both humans and machines will be the key to not only a better search experience for consumers but also a more effective engagement strategy for brands.
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Gil Geron, CEO & Co-Founder, Orca Security
AI Appreciation Day is a chance to reflect on how artificial intelligence is changing everything around us. In cybersecurity, that change is both urgently needed and already underway. Cloud environments continue to grow in complexity, producing an overwhelming volume of alerts, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations-ultimately leading to potential exposure for organizations. Security teams are expected to do more with less, often without the resources to act quickly or confidently.
AI can help security teams cut through the noise by turning fragmented cloud data into clear, actionable insights and powerful results. The most effective tools do more than accelerate response times. They add context, make insights accessible across roles, and are transparent about how conclusions are reached. These qualities are essential if AI is going to strengthen, not just speed up, the work of defenders.
AI’s role in security is not static. It is evolving alongside the threats we face. The challenge now is to guide that evolution with care, ensuring that AI is reliable, responsible, and aligned with the people who depend on it.
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Vincent Payen, SVP & GM of Pro Products at ServiceTitan
In the past few years, AI in SaaS has gone from simplifying actions and providing insights to proactively automating entire business functions. Native AI Agents now transcend traditional classic product boundaries, leveraging comprehensive contextual understanding to optimize trades businesses and transform how they operate. Marketing campaigns are now automatically adjusted in real time, virtual agents not only answer the phone but optimize job booking and dispatching decisions, and technicians in the field are assisted by AI as they diagnose issues and interact with customers.
This AI Appreciation Day underscores the immense impact of AI while highlighting the incredible potential that is yet to be realized. Looking ahead, skilled trades businesses that had historically been behind in technology adoption will emerge as leaders in AI adoption. Few industries are better positioned to harness the full transformative potential of AI.
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Luiz Domingos, CTO, Head of Large Enterprise R&D at Mitel
As AI reshapes how organizations operate, its most meaningful contributions lie not in novelty but in delivering practical, trusted outcomes. Real impact comes from implementing AI with a clear purpose and weaving it into everyday workflows. When applied thoughtfully, AI can streamline operations, enhance customer experience, and boost enterprise productivity. We’re already seeing this with tools like conversational chatbots, real-time analytics, and intelligent virtual assistants. However, true progress also demands responsible execution. Especially in regulated industries, success hinges on balancing innovation with a strong commitment to data privacy, compliance, and long-term sustainability. AI Appreciation Day reminds us that the future of business transformation isn’t just about what AI can do, but how intentionally and securely we choose to deploy it.
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Garrett Calpouzos, Principal Security Researcher at Sonatype
Amidst the noise about AI’s potential to drive business impact, it’s easy to lose sight of a key cohort that’s already seeing meaningful, measurable progress: developers. AI is accelerating code creation and minimizing manual tasks. The impact on time-to-market and developer productivity is undeniable.
But as a security researcher, I also see the cost of all this acceleration. Hallucinated syntax, unreliable dependencies, and missing context can all lead to vulnerabilities proliferating at an equally staggering rate. In addition, at Sonatype, we’re seeing malicious developers use AI to generate new variable malware with alarming speed.
AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder: we can celebrate how AI is improving the developer experience, but we also need to invest in protecting developers from the novel risks it brings. Human developers remain the backbone of innovation and trust. AI should be used to enhance our capabilities, not undermine our safety. As we move forward, building responsible, transparent, and secure AI systems isn’t optional; it’s the cost of progress.
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Jimmy Mesta, Co-Founder and CTO of RAD Security
Security teams use stacks that generate thousands of signals a minute across dozens of tools. It’s no longer possible to define every relationship between those signals with rules alone. AI is now actually the only way teams can keep up. Instead of using clumsy rules that keep breaking, AI can spot patterns, connect events across multiple parts of the security stack, and take action fast enough to matter. It’s basically necessary to use AI for at least some of these tasks, if you want a lean security team to continue to function at scale with a mature stack.
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Josh Mason, CTO of RecordPoint
A massive AI transformation is underway across all levels of the enterprise, from engineers vibe-coding whole applications in days, not weeks, to executives streamlining communication and strategy.
The companies that will experience success with this transformative technology will be those who rethink their entire business model and governance approach. Signing up for a company Copilot or Chat GPT license isn’t enough – and it doesn’t manage your risk. You have to make sure you’re governing your data and using the technology responsibly and ethically, in a way that benefits your customers and employees.
That’s why many businesses have struggled to implement GenAI tools, finding themselves stuck at the pilot phase. According to one study, only 6% of businesses reported moving to a large-scale deployment of Copilot. The number one reason is poor governance of unstructured data.
The key is for businesses to get ahead of the curve on ethical AI governance. By proactively aligning their use of AI with principles of customer focus and employee wellbeing, they can unlock the benefits of the technology while mitigating the risks. This kind of responsible, forward-looking approach will be critical for success in the years to come.
At the core of the solution is data. Companies need to focus on locating and understanding the sensitive customer data they have, and their obligations when it comes to data retention and minimization, access and security. They can accelerate AI adoption with a risk-based, data-centric approach to identifying fit for purpose data for model training, ensuring that the only data that goes into an AI model is that which does not contain confidential or sensitive information.
With the rise of agentic AI, these models are becoming more embedded into our working and personal lives. Businesses that prioritize governance – with a focus on data at the core – will be those best positioned to benefit from this transformation.
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Jeff Cotten, CEO, PROS
At PROS, we believe AI’s greatest promise isn’t in automation, it’s in elevation. While many focus on how AI streamlines repetitive or technical tasks, its real value lies in how it transforms the way people work, think, and lead. AI enables individuals and teams to devote more energy to work that requires creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic decision-making.
AI isn’t here to replace human insight—it’s here to amplify it. AI is a trusted co-pilot; an intelligent assistant that accelerates learning, supports decisions, and scales productivity. With the right guardrails, AI becomes a force multiplier that helps every employee act with purpose and lead with impact. Because leadership isn’t reserved for those with a fancy title—it’s unlocked through the right tools.
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Christina Fung, SVP and Head of Global AI Enablement Center of excellence, CGI
Excitement and anticipation for AI technology continues to build, and for good reason. According to the 2025 CGI Voice of Our Clients, AI and automation have become top investment priorities for executives across industries, driven by their ability to deliver results and unlock value. At the same time, AI has seen unprecedented growth among consumers, with generative AI tools like ChatGPT now accessible across nearly all personal devices.
Yet, as adoption accelerates, the question is not just what AI can do, but what it should do. AI for good starts with intentional design — addressing real business problems while enabling new opportunities — with values and ethics woven into every decision. For example, when sustainability is already part of a company’s DNA, AI becomes a natural extension of that mission. By aligning early use cases to business strategy, organizational values and broader societal goals, organizations can scale responsibly and boldly.
On this AI Appreciation Day, we celebrate how far AI has come, the promise of a responsible future built with intention, and the humans who continue to shape what comes next and who will be the beneficiaries of its progress.
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Dr. Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus
Artificial intelligence is not just reshaping the tech landscape—it’s redefining the very architecture of innovation. From data centers to endpoints, AI is driving unprecedented demand for specialized, high-performance chips that can handle the complexity and scale of modern workloads. As AI evolves, it’s not only enabling smarter systems but also democratizing intelligence—bringing scalable, secure, and energy-efficient solutions to every corner of the digital world.
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Jerry Levine, Chef Evangelist and General Counsel, ContractPodAi
As automation and AI agents become more embedded in day-to-day workflows, legal teams are gaining the ability to focus less on manual review and more on higher-value strategic work.
Looking toward the future, many legal functions are shifting from reactive support roles to more proactive, data-driven operations. AI is helping legal teams deliver faster insights, streamline risk management, and create more consistent service delivery across the business.
The key challenge now is not only adoption, but smart implementation. Appreciating AI means recognizing both its power and its limitations, and introducing it in ways that support professionals, build trust, and drive lasting value. That requires human oversight, formal review protocols, and policies that define when and how AI tools should be used.
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Tiancheng Xie, Chief Technical Officer, Polyhedra
AI Appreciation Day reminds us why we celebrate advances in artificial intelligence while emphasizing that innovation alone isn’t enough. Recently, we’ve seen AI generate lifelike videos, pass professional exams, accelerate drug discovery, and write code at a near-human level. These breakthroughs show how fast the field is moving but also highlight the need for us to responsibly guide its impact.
I believe AI’s true transformative power hinges on accountability, a factor lagging behind its rapid innovation. Current systems fall short on transparency and verifiability even as models are growing smarter and more autonomous. This isn’t just important; it’s essential for trust, especially when AI systems influence critical pillars such as healthcare, finance, and infrastructure.
Polyhedra was founded for this exact purpose. We’re addressing this gap through cutting-edge zero knowledge proofs with verifiable inference: each model not only produces an outcome, but also cryptographically proves how it arrived there, allowing organizations to embrace intelligent automation with confidence and responsibility.
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Brian Stafford, President and CEO, Diligent
The proliferation of agentic AI systems has led to a wide-scale race to deploy and govern AI. With a record number of Americans nearing the retirement age, many organizations are looking to AI to fill the looming talent gap. Despite the growing reliance on AI, human workers remain essential to the AI development cycle; however, they need to be properly trained in order to fully reap its benefits.
As organizations seek to harness the potential of AI, upskilling and reskilling employees have become crucial for success. Rather than replacing jobs, AI will build on the skills of those who master its use. To remain competitive, employees across all levels of an organization – from C-Suite executives to interns – must be trained to effectively use AI systems. By developing AI fluency, humans will not only remain integral to workflows, but it will empower them to adapt quickly, collaborate effectively and stay aligned with strategic business goals and key industry trends, ultimately thriving in a hybrid workforce environment.
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Ben Canning, Chief Product Officer at Alteryx
AI is reshaping the workplace, not by replacing people, but by enhancing their expertise and enabling faster, smarter decision-making. By democratizing access to data, AI empowers people to think more strategically and drive greater impact in their roles.
While AI excels at analyzing and integrating data at scale, it lacks human judgment and contextual understanding. That’s where business analysts and domain experts play an important role. With AI-powered tools, analysts can spend less time organizing data and more time uncovering insights and driving meaningful outcomes.
Putting AI directly into the hands of those closest to the business removes long-standing barriers and unlocks innovation across organizations. This is the true promise of AI at work: a future shaped not just by algorithms, but by the people who guide and apply them.
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Niraj Tolia, CTO at Veeam
AI Appreciation Day is a moment to celebrate the current impact and the remarkable future potential of artificial intelligence on our professional and personal lives. However, it’s also a reminder of its greatest dependency: clean, available, and protected data. AI can only deliver results if its data foundation is resilient. If this foundation is compromised or inaccessible, AI initiatives will grind to a halt.
Organizations are generating a goldmine of data; the real challenge is ensuring it’s always available and secure. We need to ensure that this data is not locked behind walled gardens and that it is always secured. That’s why data resilience must be a board-level priority, not just innovation alone.
To truly lead in AI, we must build with resilience, openness, and data portability at the core. If we want to keep AI advancing, we need to guarantee that the data fueling it at the foundation is always protected, always accessible, and always ready for action.
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Sid Sheth, co-founder and CEO, d-Matrix
This AI Appreciation Day is the perfect time to acknowledge that with the demand of today’s AI compute load, we are firmly in the era of inference, where the focus on facilitating dynamic, interactive, and instant AI interactions takes center stage. The increasing adoption of inference in consumer and business domains is fueling a notable surge in supporting reasoning and real-time computation. To lead in this changing environment, it is crucial to drive innovation in data center infrastructure, emphasizing efficiency, scalability, and sustainability at every stage.
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Jack Fu, CEO of Draco Evolution Corps
AI is playing a central role in financial markets, offering tools to uncover patterns, manage risk and make decisions at speeds and scales beyond human capabilities. AI-driven strategies are becoming more accessible, which is reshaping how both institutional and individual investors engage with markets.
AI also gives individual investors a tool to compete with much larger players in the market. This shift also raises questions about transparency, ethics and responsibility, which underscores the need for AI systems that are explainable and aligned with long-term investor interests. The future of investing will depend not just on performance, but on how these technologies are built and governed.
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George Cornell, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Mark43
At Mark43, we see the potential that AI has to be a driving force for public safety to work smarter and faster, and keep their communities and their teams safer. Integrated into public safety workflows, AI can enable first responders to concentrate on what matters most: protecting communities and fostering public trust by automating administrative and time consuming tasks, such as sharing information with responders, writing reports, searching for leads, and summarizing cases. AI offers exciting possibilities for agencies to extract real-time insights for improved operations and strategic response – arriving to emergency scenes faster and more prepared, leveraging their teams effectively and efficiently, and solving cases faster. We envision a future where AI-powered public safety solutions enhance officer judgment, accelerate operational speed, and ultimately, save lives.
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Daniel Saks, CEO of Landbase
I’m not sure AI needs its own appreciation day because the best AI won’t ask to be celebrated. It just works quietly in the background, giving us our time back. That’s what I appreciate.
The future isn’t about being more machine. It’s about being more human.
If AI can automate the manual, repetitive tasks that drain us — for example in go-to-market — then we get to spend less time buried in CRMs or cold lists, and more time doing what we love.
Tools like Landbase are helping sales and marketing pros reclaim their day by automating lead gen and finding the right customers faster. When software works for you, not the other way around, every day feels like AI Appreciation Day.
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Dean Drako, CEO of Eagle Eye Networks
Appreciation is growing for AI-powered security cameras and the benefits they can bring to businesses, schools and cities. Enhanced with AI, a standard security camera can proactively identify problematic situations and alert authorities so they can take action to resolve issues before accidents, theft, or other emergencies develop. Furthermore, cloud-based video surveillance combined with AI can identify trends business owners can use to increase efficiency and optimize operations. Of course, the ethical use of technology and data privacy are always paramount. When designed, deployed, and operated with transparency and cybersecurity, AI-powered security cameras can dramatically improve business efficiency and make the world a safer place.
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Adam Luciano, VP, Product Management, MariaDB
On AI Appreciation Day, it’s clear we’re entering a transformative phase in how intelligent systems interact with the world. Over the next few years, we expect to see a shift from traditional AI models to more autonomous, context-aware AI agents — capable of reasoning, planning and taking actions across tools and platforms.
These agents are already beginning to move beyond chat interfaces and into systems that handle workflows, automate research and collaborate with humans in more meaningful ways. To function effectively, they depend on real-time data access, semantic understanding and the ability to integrate with a wide range of APIs, tools and databases.
This shift is creating new demands on infrastructure:
- Vector search and retrieval are becoming foundational, enabling agents to work with embeddings and unstructured data for language, images and more.
- Open protocols and toolchains like LangChain and LlamaIndex are emerging as critical glue as well as the newer connectivity provided by MCP Servers, connecting AI models with memory, context and action.
- Open-source databases are evolving to meet these needs — adding native support for unstructured data, faster indexing and integration hooks for AI-native workloads.
At MariaDB, we’re actively contributing to this evolution by enhancing our enterprise database platform to better support these agentic use cases — with high-performance vector operations and flexible integration paths for AI frameworks.
The era of intelligent agents is not a distant vision — it’s arriving now. And over the next few years, organizations that build on adaptable, AI-ready infrastructure will be the ones positioned to lead in this new paradigm.
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Anatolli Chernyakov, Head of Product, Uploadcare
AI has fundamentally shifted us from a world of irreversible decisions to one of infinite exploration. For decades, every choice in technology carried weight because resources were limited – pick one approach, commit your team’s time, live with the consequences.
What fascinates me the most is how AI has changed our relationship with possibility itself. When experimentation becomes nearly cost-free, you can explore every variation, test every approach, see every potential outcome before committing to anything – you stop trying to make “perfect” choices and start focusing on learning quickly.
This shift mirrors what we see across all creative disciplines – the tools don’t replace human judgment; they expand the canvas on which we can exercise it. A developer can now ask, “What if?” without the traditional penalties of time and resources. They can code by description, optimize by intention, create by feeling rather than just by specification.
The organizations thriving with AI aren’t necessarily the most technically sophisticated – they’re the ones that have learned to work with uncertainty differently. They treat AI as creative infrastructure that enhances human judgment rather than replacing it. Looking ahead, I believe AI’s greatest contribution won’t be in automating what we already do, but in expanding what we think is possible.
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Michael Sonier, General Manager, ButterCMS
On AI appreciation day, let’s celebrate the leaders and companies who are embracing the opportunity, turning disruption into differentiation and steering clear of fear:
Opportunity: AI is powering exponential growth in content creation. Companies that embrace this opportunity and lean into tools that enable them to efficiently create, manage and curate the treasure trove of AI enabled content are winning
Disruption: AI is disrupting paradigms. A great example we are seeing daily is the impact of AI on search. Leaders who adapt best, and use AI as an SEO asset, will win.
Clear the Fear: Companies that are curious, not fearful win. We are learning every day that AI is not going to take humans out of the content creation, management, optimization process – it’s a powerful tool that, when leveraged by humans, enables them (the humans) to create better personalized digital experiences…for humans.
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Binny Gill, CEO, Kognitos
This AI Appreciation Day, we should celebrate a crucial evolution: the shift from AI as an impenetrable ‘black box’ to AI as a transparent engine for business. For too long, we’ve focused on outputs without understanding the process. The real breakthrough is AI that opens this box, allowing us to see, audit, and trust the ‘how’ behind every execution. This transparency is the bedrock of trust. It’s what allows businesses to move beyond cautious experimentation and confidently automate mission-critical operations. An AI you can’t audit is a potential liability; an AI built on a verifiable process is the ultimate partner for long-term growth and human achievement.
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Boris Kuiper, COO at Smoothstack
AI isn’t a free lunch—it’s an accelerator, but only if you pair it with the right guardrails, oversight, and skills. At Smoothstack, we see AI as a tool to amplify great developers, not replace them. Our adapted training model equips talent with the skills to navigate AI confidently: when to trust it, when to intervene, and how to drive outcomes faster without cutting corners. We’re building a workforce that’s not just AI-aware, but AI-capable and future-ready.
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Dia Ali, Global Platforms & Solutions Lead Hitachi Vantara
AI’s continued progress made every day reminds us that we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible, especially when it comes to the edge. AI at the edge is not just a technological leap, it’s the engine for a new era of proactive decision-making, enabling enterprises to gain real-time intelligence with expanded visibility and reach directly where data is created. This empowers businesses to unlock truly transformative outcomes, from optimizing complex operations and enhancing customer experiences to driving unprecedented efficiencies. We are actively shaping a future where data and AI converge to redefine what’s achievable, moving businesses closer to fully intelligent enterprises.
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Raj De Datt, co-founder and CEO and at Bloomreach
We’re witnessing two fundamental revolutions happening simultaneously that are transforming how businesses operate and how consumers engage online. The first is the conversational revolution — where customers can now communicate with websites as naturally as they would with an in-store sales associate, conveying rich context and emotion that simple clicks never could. The second is the agentic revolution, where we’re moving beyond rigid workflows to AI agents that understand our goals and execute the ‘how’ while we focus on strategic thinking. At Bloomreach, we’ve built our agentic platform for personalization around these principles, enabling autonomous search, conversational shopping, and autonomous marketing that responds to each customer as a unique individual rather than just another data point in a segment.
What excites me most about AI isn’t just its technical capabilities, but how it’s fundamentally reframing work itself — not as a series of steps to be optimized, but as an opportunity for humans to think as deeply, strategically, and creatively as we’ve always wanted to, while AI handles the execution with superhuman precision and scale.
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Chris Fleischmann, Founder and CEO at Arthur Technologies
While much is said about how enterprise AI takes repetitive tasks off our plates, we believe its true, transformative power lies in elevating how we work together. By enhancing decision-making, revealing insights we might have overlooked, and connecting the dots in unexpected ways, AI helps us make our ideas stronger and our collaboration deeper.
It’s not about thinking for us — it’s about creating the space for clearer thinking, sharper focus, and more confident decisions.
When applied thoughtfully, AI can be a catalyst for better collaboration:
- It frees us to tackle complex problems, embrace new perspectives, and focus our energy where human creativity and judgment matter most.
- It transforms scattered information into meaningful insights, turning noise into clarity and enabling teams to process vast input — quickly and intelligently.
- It empowers us to stay curious, keep questioning, and bring our most human qualities — empathy, imagination, and critical thinking — to the work that shapes our future.
Fortune 500 users of Arthur Vibe have already seen this in action. Our asynchronous, dynamic AI-led interviews uncover perspectives that might otherwise go unheard, distill them into actionable insights, and enable better, faster decisions on the issues that matter most.
We’re committed to helping build a future where humans and AI not only coexist — but thrive together.
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Daniel Anstandig, CEO, Futuri Media
AI is changing how content is created and how we connect, inform, and inspire each other. At Futuri, we see AI as a powerful amplifier for human creativity that can help media companies thrive in a world where speed, relevance, and trust matter more than ever. We’ve built a suite of AI solutions designed to address the biggest challenges facing today’s media and publishing industries – whether that means staying ahead of fast-moving news cycles, supporting short-staffed newsrooms, meeting the demand for immediate, engaging content, automating mundane tasks, or cost-effectively transforming stories into professionally produced audiobooks.
AI and humans are better together. When you combine human intuition with AI’s generative power, you can create content that resonates with all types of audiences. This technology is turning storytellers into tech-powered influencers who can extend their reach, enhance their craft, and deliver their message with unprecedented impact.
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Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Dryad Networks
While AI applications are proliferating everywhere, using AI in impactful ways is crucial. AI is more than just technology; it’s a catalyst for change, driving innovation and enabling us to protect our planet in ways we never thought possible. At Dryad Networks, we harness the power of AI to monitor and protect forests, detecting wildfires in their earliest stages to prevent catastrophic damage. On AI Appreciation Day, let’s celebrate the transformative power of AI and its potential to create a sustainable future for all.
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Puneet Mehta, CEO of Netomi
As AI becomes the cognitive infrastructure of modern enterprises this year, we’re moving beyond one-off tools into an era of deeply embedded agentic systems—AI agents that operate autonomously, adapt in real-time, and scale knowledge work across business functions. At Netomi, we’ve seen this firsthand while deploying AI in production across Fortune 500 companies, where customer experience, compliance, and operational continuity demand nothing less than industrial-grade reliability. To successfully scale AI across the enterprise, we’re seeing a few design principles prove critical:
- Outcome-Driven Deployment: AI initiatives must be tied directly to business KPIs like CSAT, NPS, or operational efficiency—not just technical milestones.
- Agentic Architecture: Building for composability and domain-specific autonomy enables AI agents to adapt quickly, specialize deeply, and collaborate with humans in real-time.
- Operational Guardrails: Strong feedback loops, human-in-the-loop systems, and transparent escalation policies ensure trust, safety, and alignment with enterprise controls.
- Lean Integration: Just like Toyota’s production system, the most successful deployments focus on eliminating cognitive waste—repetitive tasks, swivel-chair decisions, or unnecessary human approvals.
- Continuous Adaptation: With models evolving and business conditions changing, AI must be treated as a living system—constantly monitored, retrained, and optimized.
- Looking ahead, the biggest shift isn’t technical—it’s cultural. Leaders who treat AI as a core business capability (not a science experiment) will define the future of enterprise productivity. We believe AI won’t just support customer experience—it will become the backbone of it.
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Anthony Lewis, CTO of Brainchip
The most powerful AI stories are the ones you can hold in your hands — technologies that improve health, safety, and wellbeing. Making this possible is the increasing amount of AI brought directly to edge devices — where data is generated — without relying on the cloud. AI will be integrated into every aspect of life, invisible, seamless and always on. It will predict and react to a user’s needs in real time, often before those needs are recognized.
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Kenny Johnston, Chief Product Officer of Instabug
AI Appreciation Day is a great time to think about how AI is making the transition from hype to genuine usefulness—particularly for developers. It’s not necessarily about replacing tasks, but about eliminating friction so that teams can concentrate on what truly matters: creating great digital experiences.
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Dr. Maitreya Natu, Chief Scientist at Digitate
AI Appreciation Day is a chance to focus on how AI is giving rise to new roles that thrive on human partnership. People will need to train, explain, and maintain these intelligent systems and agents. And through this collaboration, they can build workplaces that are smarter, more transparent, and adaptable.
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Rob Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage
AI Appreciation Day is a timely reminder of how far artificial intelligence has come, and how much further we need to go to make it truly enterprise-ready at scale. For global organizations, building and deploying AI at scale presents real challenges: training modern models produce massive volumes of high-quality data which in turn requires complex infrastructure that supports intense parallel compute and throughput demands. We must also ensure that data storage is accessible, properly governed, and capable of supporting the growing capabilities of AI, as better data storage is what will ultimately drive emerging AI technology forward over the next decade. As AI’s growth continues to impact energy scarcity, implementing efficient data storage measures is critical in managing the proliferation of data and preserving the future of AI. Recent innovations, such as Pure Storage’s Enterprise Data Cloud, are further evidence of how unifying and managing data across multiple complex environments can truly unlock AI’s full potential, driving opportunities for further innovation.
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Michael Bachman, Head of Architecture and AI Strategy, Boomi Innovation Group
We’re entering the Agent Economy, an era where systems of agents with varying degrees of autonomy interact across platforms, handling complex processes and fueling business operations. This opens the door to great possibilities for innovation and productivity.
But with all this power comes growing complexity. There are already close to 10 emerging agent-to-agent protocols, and dozens more are expected as platforms race to define their own standards. Without an intentional approach, we’re heading toward agent sprawl, where ungoverned, overlapping agents are unpredictable, opening the door to security, compliance, and operational risks.
What’s needed is a framework to build, govern, and deploy AI agents at scale, not just within individual platforms, but across entire ecosystems.
Whether someone is a “vibe coder,” senior dev, or anyone in between, each human who interacts with GenAI and agentic systems is capable of making any idea come to fruition. These tools don’t just automate tasks; they extend human capabilities, giving people the power to build faster, smarter, and with more context than ever before.
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Roy Akerman, VP of Identity Security Strategy, Silverfort
AI is the defining force of our time—reshaping how we live, work, and secure the digital world. It’s no longer just enhancing our tools—it’s becoming the tool. Autonomous, fast, and increasingly unpredictable, AI is accelerating innovation at machine speed. But as we unlock its power, we must confront a new reality: we’re not just building smarter systems—we’re building entities that can act on their own. And we must secure them accordingly.
In identity and cybersecurity, AI flips the script. It enables real-time risk decisions, predictive access control, and autonomous response—faster than any human can act. But that same speed is now in the hands of attackers, using AI-driven agents that evolve, adapt, and evade traditional defenses.
Organizations must adopt AI boldly—but with visibility, guardrails, and precision. Gradual integration, layered privilege management, and continuous oversight—by humans or AI—are essential. AI can be our greatest ally or our most dangerous threat. Securing AI identities—human, machine, or autonomous—is no longer optional.
AI is becoming the pilot, not the co-pilot. But without a control tower, even the smartest flight crashes. Identity is that tower—our fuse box, our failsafe. If AI is the electricity of the future, identity security ensures it doesn’t short-circuit the mission.
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Matt Psencik, Director, Security and Product Design Research at Tanium
Generative AI has become an invaluable tool for cybersecurity professionals to speed up research, automate mundane tasks, and explain complex code, essentially acting as an on-demand digital expert that expands skill sets and boosts efficiency.
At the same time, the rapid advances in AI-generated content are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, blurring the line between real and synthetic content. This is where the risks come in: deepfakes and similar hyper-realistic content provide a striking example, as they’re capable of mimicking video and audio with uncanny precision while posing significant threats to user trust and information integrity. So, while AI offers tremendous benefits when powered by accurate, real-time data, it also opens the door to new forms of abuse. As we celebrate this potential, we must remain vigilant and develop safeguards to ensure the responsible use of AI. Ultimately, AI is a powerful force that can do great good, but only if it’s used responsibly.
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Dan Pinto, CEO & co-founder, Fingerprint
It’s important to reflect on three transformative ways AI has reshaped the digital world.
First, AI has enhanced the consumer purchasing journey, enabling businesses to deliver personalized experiences that dynamically adapt to individual preferences, browsing patterns, and needs—creating unique, tailored interactions and recommendations that would be impossible to achieve at scale through traditional methods.
Second, AI has allowed organizations to strengthen their defenses against malicious actors by using sophisticated technology like device intelligence to detect and analyze behavioral patterns, enabling businesses to identify and respond to threats faster than any team of human analysts.
Third, AI has democratized access to complex analytical capabilities that were once only available to large enterprises with substantial technical resources. Small businesses and individual creators with minimal coding experience can now use automation tools to develop simple apps and websites.
However, this AI Appreciation Day also serves as a moment for reflection about AI adoption. While we celebrate AI’s capabilities, we must maintain intelligent human oversight, creating guardrails that allow AI agents to serve as effective decision-makers without reducing them to rigid, rule-based systems that stifle their adaptive potential.
Organizations must also remain vigilant about the dual-use nature of AI technologies, recognizing that the same tools enhancing legitimate business operations can be weaponized by bad actors for sophisticated fraud schemes that can easily bypass traditional detection methods.
The path forward requires embracing AI’s transformative potential while implementing thoughtful governance frameworks that preserve both innovation and security.
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Sandeep Menon, CEO & co-founder, Auxia
The CMO role is changing entirely due to AI. After speaking with dozens of marketing executives this year, the same pattern emerges everywhere: traditional marketing structures have become unsustainable. The old marketing model demanded sprawling support ecosystems—just to enable 10 marketers, you often needed multiple data analysts, content designers, agency copywriters, brand strategists, visual designers, QA specialists, project managers, and platform operations staff.
This bloated setup didn’t just slow execution — it drained resources, created cross-functional bottlenecks, and made agile iteration nearly impossible. Every change required coordination across multiple teams, leading to delays, misaligned messaging, and missed opportunities. Worse, by the time insights reached the surface, consumer behavior had often already shifted, making the response ineffective.
AI is changing this through role compression – the merging of previously distinct functions into unified capabilities. We’re witnessing the rise of the supermarketer who combines strategic thinking with AI-powered analytics and creative vision with data-driven decisions. These professionals work alongside AI agents that handle the technical and operational heavy lifting, freeing them to focus on strategy, creativity, and customer experience.
Today’s supermarketer sets objectives and guardrails for AI systems that execute millions of micro-decisions automatically. They use decision agents to orchestrate personalized experiences for each individual customer in real-time, analyst agents to accelerate insights that would take human analysts weeks to discover, and content agents to automatically generate and continuously optimize hundreds of touchpoints across channels. This isn’t about replacing human creativity – it’s about augmenting it with machine intelligence that scales.
On AI Appreciation Day, we’re celebrating the rise of the supermarketer. Companies that embrace this new model will create a competitive advantage that compounds through refined customer experiences that traditional marketing structures cannot match. The age of the supermarketer isn’t just a future vision – it is just around the corner.
Original Story: https://vmblog.com/archive/2025/07/16/celebrating-ai-appreciation-day-2025-technology-leaders-reflect-on-ai-s-revolutionary-year.aspx
