Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2025

Bridge the gap between LLMs and business data

The promise of Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize how businesses interact with their data has captured the imagination of enterprises worldwide. Yet, as organizations rush to implement AI solutions, they’re discovering a fundamental challenge: LLMs, for all their linguistic prowess, weren’t designed to understand the complex, heterogeneous landscape of enterprise data systems. The gap between natural language processing capabilities and structured business data access represents one of the most significant technical hurdles in realizing AI’s full potential in the enterprise. The Fundamental Mismatch LLMs excel at understanding and generating human language, having been trained on vast corpora of text. However, enterprise data lives in a fundamentally different paradigm—structured databases, semi-structured APIs, legacy systems, and cloud applications, each with its own schema, access patterns, and governance requirements. This creates a three-dimensional problem space: Fi...

UiPath adds new capabilities for simplified agent development

UiPath today announced several updates across its portfolio at its user conference, UiPath FUSION, in Las Vegas. “Available today, this combination of pre-built solutions, new capabilities for orchestrations, and supporting tools for building and testing agents and automations creates an ecosystem that enables organizations to deploy rapid agentic automation,” the company wrote in an announcement . The company announced UiPath Agents, which allows teams to build AI agents using a combination of low-code and traditional coding. Its Agent Builder provides a visual canvas for debugging and optimizing agents, as well as reusable templates for agents that cut down on deployment time. Additionally, new integrations with Teams, Slack, and Copilot enable development teams to extend the capabilities of conversational agents in those platforms, such as added support for voice, desktop triggers, and human hand-offs. Other new agent building capabilities for developers include Coded Agents wi...

Zapier Adds Copilot Assistant and Enterprise-Grade Governance to AI Orchestration Platform

Zapier , the most connected AI orchestration platform, today announced major upgrades to let every company drive impact with AI. Zapier has launched Copilot, made multiple core tools free, enhanced enterprise governance, connected agents to data with Model Context Protocol (MCP), and added 30+ AI integrations. Unveiled at Zapier’s ZapConnect user conference, the additions signify the biggest evolution of the platform. By combining AI-powered workflow discovery and enterprise-grade governance tools, Zapier aims to act as the central nervous system for business AI deployment. “Organizations are dealing with AI tool overload just like they faced software overload a decade ago,” said Chris Geoghegan, Vice President, Product, at Zapier. “Copilot doesn’t just help you build automations; it helps you find opportunities you never knew existed. We’re making powerful AI orchestration as easy as having a conversation, whether you’re a business user getting more productive, or an IT team support...

Anthropic claims its newly released Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the “best coding model in the world”

Anthropic has announced the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5 , which it claims is the “best coding model in the world” and the “strongest model for building complex agents.” It achieves a 77.2% on the SWE-bench for software engineering, compared to 74.5% for Claude Opus 4.1 and 72.7% for Claude Sonnet 4. For external comparison, GPT-5 Codex scored at 74.5%, GPT-5 scored 72.8%, and Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 67.2%. Additionally, it leads in the OSWorld benchmark, which tests AI models on real-world computer tasks. It scored 61.4% on that benchmark, beating out Claude Sonnet 4, which scored 42.2%. “Sonnet 4.5 can produce near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user,” Anthropic says . According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 4.5 also shows better domain-specific knowledge and reasoning in the fields of finance, law, and medicine. This model performs better on safety and alignment evaluations, the company claims. It shows a reduction in behaviors such...

Microsoft releases Aspire 9.5

Microsoft is attempting to improve the developer experience for those building distributed applications with the latest updates to Aspire, a collection of tools, templates, and packages for building such apps. One of the new features in Aspire 9.5 that Microsoft drew attention to is a preview for a new command: aspire update . This new command automatically detects and updates SDK and AppHost packages, validates package compatibility before applying changes, and asks for confirmation before making changes. It supports stable, daily, or custom builds. Aspire 9.5 also adds a preview for the ability to create an Aspire AppHost from a single apphost.cs file without needing a project file. Developers can then add other resources and projects after the AppHost is created. “This approach reduces the complexity of the Aspire configuration, especially for folks outside of the .NET ecosystem, without comprimising the full power of .NET. New users to Aspire can get started in seconds and can ...

This week in AI updates: Google’s Data Commons MCP Server, shared projects in ChatGPT, and more (September 26, 2025)

Google adds Data Commons MCP Server, new versions of Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite The Data Commons MCP Server allows AI developers to easily access all of Data Commons’ publicly available datasets. It can be accessed via the Gemini CLI or in Google Colab, and Google has a sample agent in Colab as well to make it easier to get started. The newest version of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite features better instruction following, more concise answers to reduce token costs, and stronger multimodal and translation capabilities. The updated Gemini 2.5 Flash offers better agentic tool use and is more efficient, leading to reductions in cost. OpenAI adds shared projects to ChatGPT Business subscribers  Shared projects allow multiple people to add files and instructions to a project, so that ChatGPT can provide more tailored responses for everyone involved.  “Members can chat with the project’s context to stay on the same page as new information gets added and create work that stays con...

Microsoft unveils reimagined Marketplace for cloud solutions, AI apps, and more

Microsoft has restructured its Marketplace to serve as a central place for organizations to find cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents. This new reimagining brings together Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource to simplify cloud and AI management, Microsoft explained. It includes tens of thousands of cloud and industry solutions that can help with everything from data and analytics to productivity to security. It also features more than 3,000 AI apps and agents. “Microsoft Marketplace gives you access to thousands of AI apps and agents from our rich partner ecosystem designed to automate tasks, accelerate decision-making and unlock value across your business. With a new AI Apps and Agents category, you can easily and confidently find AI solutions that integrate with your organization’s existing Microsoft products,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post . The company highlighted over 90 featured launch partners with products in Microsoft Marketplace, including Adobe, Asana, Atlassian, I...

PostgreSQL 18 adds asynchronous I/O to improve performance

PostgreSQL 18 has been released, with several new features like asynchronous I/O, better post-upgrade performance, and improved text processing. Asynchronous I/O allows PostgreSQL to issue multiple I/O requests at the same time rather than waiting for one to finish before starting the next. According to the PostgreSQL team, this improves overall throughput, and has resulted in performance gains of up to 3x in some scenarios. Previously, PostgreSQL used operating system readahead mechanisms for data retrieval, but since the operating system didn’t have insight into database-specific access patterns, it couldn’t always anticipate what data would be required, resulting in suboptimal performance across many workloads. Asynchronous I/O was created to address that limitation, the team explained. This release also introduces the ability to keep planner statistics through major version upgrades, whereas previously they wouldn’t carry over. This helps upgraded clusters reach expected perform...

CData launches Connect AI to provide agents access to enterprise data sources

CData has announced the launch of a new managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform bringing together AI assistants, agent orchestration, workflow automation, and embedded AI applications—combined with access to over 300 enterprise data sources. According to the company, Connect AI preserves data semantics and relationships in enterprise data to give AI agents better context while still providing governance over that data access. CData’s Connect AI inherits the existing security and authentication protocols set up in the source system. Data access gets logged under the identity of the authenticated user or agent, and additional controls can be layered on top and managed in Connect AI. Some example use cases that the new offering can enable include sales teams getting pipeline insights from Claude, marketing teams being able to analyze campaigns using ChatGPT, or finance teams being able to use Copilot to get real-time budget updates and financial reports. IT and development team...

Chainguard launches trusted collection of verified JavaScript libraries

Chainguard, a company that provides a repository of trusted container images, has announced the launch of a new collection of trusted builds for JavaScript dependencies. According to Chainguard, recent attacks against the JavaScript package manager npm have underscored the need for more secure mechanisms to consume JavaScript libraries. The company says that public registries do not vet libraries or ensure that the downloaded library matches the source code. Chainguard Libraries for JavaScript include builds that are malware-resistant and built from source on SLSA L2 infrastructure, the company explained. This helps protect against malware injection at both the build and distribution links of the open source supply chain. The collection integrates with popular artifact management systems, like JFrog Artifactory and Sonatype Nexus, so that developers can improve security while using familiar tools. “We’re rebuilding every component we publish from source so organizations can mitiga...

NuGet adds support for Trusted Publishing

Microsoft has announced that NuGet now supports Trusted Publishing for publishing packages from GitHub Actions. Trusted Publishing is an authentication method that utilizes the OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard. Rather than using long-lived API tokens when publishing software packages, an OIDC identity token can be exchanged for a short-lived API token. It has been adopted by a variety of other package managers, including PyPI and now npm following a series of recent supply chain attacks. According to Microsoft, with Trusted Publishing, when the CI/CD system (in this case GitHub Actions) runs a workflow, a short-lived token is issued and sent to nuget.org . NuGet then verifies the token and returns a temporary API key that lasts one hour which the workflow can use to publish the package. “This makes your publishing process safer by reducing the risk of leaked credentials. It also makes automation easier because you don’t need to rotate or store secrets. This approach is part of a b...

Snowflake and other data companies join forces to develop vendor-neutral standard for semantic metadata

A number of data companies—including Snowflake, Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI—have announced the formation of a new open source initiative to create a vendor- neutral standard for defining and sharing semantic metadata. The Open Semantic Interchange has three main goals: enhance interoperability across tools and platforms, accelerate adoption of AI and BI applications, and streamlining operations. According to the group, organizations rely on a patchwork of AI, BI, and analytics tools, and this initiative will develop a shared semantic standard that allows these tools to “speak the same language.” By standardizing how semantics are defined and shared, the Open Semantic Interchange hopes to ensure that data is governed, consistent, and context-rich, helping with adoption of AI. And finally, by having a standard, teams won’t have to spend time reconciling conflicting definitions or duplicating work across platforms, which can be time-consuming. “At Snowflake, we...

GitHub details upcoming changes to improve security in wake of Shai-Hulud worm in npm ecosystem

In response to the recent supply chain attack in the JavaScript package manager npm, GitHub has made a few changes that will enable stronger security. The attack on the npm ecosystem was caused by a worm, named Shai-Hulud, that infects and republish other packages with its malware to spread it across the npm ecosystem. “By combining self-replication with the capability to steal multiple types of secrets (and not just npm tokens), this worm could have enabled an endless stream of attacks had it not been for timely action from GitHub and open source maintainers,” GitHub wrote in a blog post . GitHub initially responded by removing over 500 compromised packages from the npm registry and blocking the upload of new packages that contain Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) associated with the malicious packages. Now, the company is announcing upcoming changes to authentication and publishing options that will reduce the risk of token abuse and self-replicating malware. It will require two-f...

Digital.ai launches White-box Cryptography Agent to enable stronger application security

Digital.ai has created a new product that will make white-box cryptography accessible to all developers, not just cryptography experts. White-box cryptography is a technique that adds cryptographic protections directly into application code, making it hard for attackers to obtain secret information, like cryptographic keys. Digital.ai’s White-box Cryptography Agent provides access to a white-box cryptography library through an API. The library uses rule-based procedural actions to conceal cryptographic operations from attackers. By utilizing the new agent, developers don’t have to make complex decisions about algorithms, can reduce the chance of misconfigurations, and can deliver applications that benefit from increased security, Digital.ai explained. The White-box Cryptography Agent is offered as part of Digital.ai’s Key and Protection products, which are FIPS 140-3 certified. “Application security has always been an arms race, one fought with tools, where the goal isn’t to be u...

Benchmarking AI-assisted developers (and their tools) for superior AI governance

A quick browse of LinkedIn, DevTok, and X would lead you to believe that almost every developer has jumped on board the vibe coding hype train with full gusto. And while it’s not that far-fetched, with 84% of developers confirming they are currently using (or planning to use) AI coding tools in their daily workflows, a full surrender to vibe coding autonomous agents is still unusual. Stack Overflow’s 2025 AI Survey revealed that most respondents (72%) are not (yet) vibe coding. Still, adoption is trending upwards, and AI is currently generating 41% of all code , for better or worse. Tools like Cursor and Windsurf represent the latest generation of AI coding assistants, each with a powerful autonomous mode that can make decisions independently based on preset parameters. The speed and productivity gains are undeniable, but a worrying trend is emerging: many of these tools are being deployed in enterprise environments, and these teams are not equipped to address the inherent security ...

Report: The major factors driving employee disengagement in 2025

A new study from Adaptavist revealed that 42% of knowledge workers are reporting a reduction in motivation at work, leading to a phenomenon dubbed “quiet cracking.” Specifically, 38% of the 4,000 respondents from the UK, US, Canada, and Germany said they felt hopeless about their career advancement prospects, 38% had concerns around job security, 37% were communicating with colleagues less, and 32% experienced a loss of confidence. Adaptavist says that one of the reasons behind this is employees not understanding the why behind their work, an experience that nearly three-quarters of respondents go through. According to Adaptavist, 43% of respondents who don’t understand why they’re doing certain tasks work reported disengagement, compared to just 32% among those who understand the why. They also found that younger workers are more likely to not understand the why of their work, with 34% of 18-24 years olds saying they sometimes or rarely understand the why, compared to the average...

This week in AI updates: OpenAI Codex updates, Claude integration in Xcode 26, and more (September 19, 2025)

OpenAI updates Codex The company released GPT-5-Codex, a variant of GPT-5 that is optimized for Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding agent. It was trained on real-world engineering tasks like building projects from scratch, adding features and tests, debugging, large-scale refactoring, and code reviews. “With these updates, Codex moves closer to what we’ve been building toward all along—a teammate that understands your context, works alongside you, and reliably takes on work for your team,” OpenAI wrote in a post . Other recent updates to Codex have included the Codex CLI; the Codex IDE extension in VS Code, Cursor, and other VS Code forks; and more advanced code review capabilities. Xcode 26 gets Claude integration Xcode is Apple’s IDE for building apps across Apple platforms, and Claude users will now be able to connect up their Anthropic account to their Xcode environment to get access to Claude Sonnet 4 capabilities. In Xcode, Claude can help generate documentation, provide explanation...

Report: How engineering leaders and execs feel about adopting AI agents for testing

Engineering leadership and executives are out of touch when it comes to software testing and how AI can be applied to the process, according to Sauce Labs’ 2025 Software Testing Vibe Check: Agentic Edition report. 61% of survey respondents—who consisted of 400 testing executives and engineering leaders surveyed in June 2024—said that their top leadership “lacks a full understanding of software testing requirements.” 65% of engineering leaders agreed with this statement, compared to just 57% of executives. The report also found that 77% of engineers believe agentic AI will be able to test software autonomously by 2027, compared to only 67% of executives. However, Sauce Labs cautioned that their optimism may not match reality, since most current AI agents fall short of their promises. “This bullish sentiment reflects the persistent hype swirling about the media and social media platforms. It doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon,” Sauce Labs wrote in the report. The company a...

Wasm 3.0 standard is now officially complete

Version 3.0 of the WebAssembly (Wasm) standard is now complete and considered the “live” standard for Wasm. This announcement comes three years after the completion of Wasm 2.0, which had added many features like vector instructions, bulk memory operations, multiple return values, and simple reference types. According to the Wasm W3C Community Group and Working Group, this is a substantial update compared to 2.0, and several of the features that are now available were in the works for six to eight years. Wasm 3.0 supports 64-bit address space , meaning that memories and tables can use i64 in addition to i32 as their address space. This expands the available address space from 4 gigabytes to 16 exabytes, in theory. Hardware and use cases will now be the limiting factor, such as the web limiting 64-bit memory to 15 gigabytes. “The new flexibility is especially interesting for non-web ecosystems using Wasm, as they can support much, much larger applications and data sets now,” the worki...

Progress adds AI coding assistance to Telerik and Kendo UI libraries

Progress has announced that it is bringing its AI coding assistants to Telerik and Kendo UI libraries. Previously, the company had added AI assistants to Progress Telerik UI for Blazor and Progress KendoReact. According to the company, with today’s release, it now offers AI coding assistance across all major UI component libraries, including ASP.NET Core, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, and Angular. Progress’ AI coding assistants integrate within developers’ existing IDE workflows and work in AI coding solutions like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor. They can complete tasks such as generating and configuring components, surfacing relevant API documentation, and resolving component-specific issues, Progress explained. These libraries also enable developers to build AI capabilities into customer-facing applications, such as conversational chat UIs, inline AI prompting, prompt-based Data Grid actions for filtering and sorting, and an AI assistant column in Data Grids. Additionally,...

MongoDB brings Search and Vector Search to self-managed versions of database

Today at its user conference MongoDB.local NYC , the popular database company announced that the Search and Vector Search capabilities that have been available in the Atlas cloud platform are now available in preview in the Community Edition and Enterprise Server . Previously, customers using self-managed versions of MongoDB would have needed to use a third-party service for vector databases, leading to a fragmented search stack that adds unnecessary complexity and risk, according to MongoDB. Ben Flast, director of product management at MongoDB, explained that the team had been working on bringing this to the Community Edition and Enterprise Server for a while, and have finally gotten to a point where it’s ready to be added. “We brought Search and Vector Search to market in Atlas only six or seven years ago, and the intention there was really like where did we think we could build a new service and evolve it very quickly, and we felt like a managed software would be an easier plac...

GitHub launches MCP Registry to provide central location for trusted servers

GitHub has launched an MCP Registry to provide developers with a curated directory of MCP servers. “If you’ve tried connecting AI agents to your development tools, you know the pain: MCP servers scattered across numerous registries, random repos, buried in community threads — making discovery slow and full of friction without a central place to go. Meanwhile, MCP server creators are worn out from publishing to multiple places and answering the same setup questions again and again,” GitHub wrote in a blog post . Each server in the Registry is connected to its own GitHub repository, and they can be sorted by GitHub stars and community activity. According to GitHub, this backing builds trust in specific MCP servers, leading to a healthier overall AI ecosystem. GitHub’s own recently launched MCP server is included in the repository. It allows agents to connect with content in GitHub repositories, issues, and pull requests. The company also said that it has been working with Anthropic...

Beyond the Pilot: A Playbook for Enterprise-Scale Agentic AI

AI agents promise a revolution in customer experience and operational efficiency. Yet, for many enterprises, that promise remains out of reach. Too many AI projects stall in the pilot phase, fail to scale, or are scrapped altogether. According to Gartner , 40% of agentic AI initiatives will be abandoned by 2027, while MIT research suggests 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver a return. The problem is not the AI models themselves, which have improved dramatically. The failure lies in everything around the AI: fragmented systems, unclear ownership, poor change management, and a failure to rethink strategy from first principles. In our work building AI agents, we see four common pitfalls that derail otherwise promising AI efforts: Diffused Ownership : When strategy is spread across CX, IT, Operations, and Engineering, no one person drives the initiative. Competing agendas create confusion and stall progress, leaving successful pilots with no path to scale. Neglecting Change Manageme...

Rocket Software Advances COBOL Modernization with GenAI and ARM Ready Deployment, Enabling Disruption-Free Transformation

Rocket Software , a global technology leader in modernization software, today announced groundbreaking innovations to its COBOL solutions , designed to help businesses update COBOL applications without disrupting ongoing operations or compromising application reliability. The announcement further underscores Rocket Software’s commitment and belief in COBOL as a mission-critical program for business success. The company’s advancements with opt-in GenAI-assisted development, expanded support for ARM processors, and deep modernization expertise uniquely empower enterprises to evolve core systems, integrate seamlessly with modern platforms, and reimagine the future potential of COBOL. COBOL remains a cornerstone of global business operations, powering 70% of the world’s business transaction processing across industries such as banking, insurance, travel, retail, and government. However, running COBOL that has not been modernized —combined with outdated engineering tools and practices—can...