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Eliminating enterprise blind spots: The new imperative for AI-driven leadership

In the race to modernize, enterprises have digitized nearly everything from customer touchpoints to back-office workflows. Yet even after massive investments in automation, analytics, and low-code platforms, most leaders still struggle with an uncomfortable truth: they cannot fully see their enterprise. Blind spots emerge when inefficiencies, disconnected systems, and data silos block leaders from seeing how their operations truly run.  The consequences are not just operational, they’re strategic.  According to a 2024 study by Bain & Company , approximately 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original goals. As we enter an era defined by artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive automation, competitive advantage will come not from doing things faster, but from seeing them clearly. Enterprises that achieve holistic visibility, what I call “Zero Blind Spots”, will lead with greater confidence, agility, and trust. The Cost of Not Seeing Clearly Blind ...

Postman Acquires Fern to Help Businesses Deliver World-Class Developer Experiences

Postman , the world’s leading API collaboration platform, today announced its acquisition of Fern , a developer experience company focused on helping businesses ship polished API documentation and production-ready Software Development Kits (SDKs). The acquisition strengthens Postman’s commitment to improving how APIs are built, documented, and consumed in an increasingly API-first world. “Great APIs are defined by great developer experiences,” said Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman. “Fern shares our belief that documentation and SDKs are critical to API adoption. By bringing Fern into the Postman family, we’re helping more teams deliver APIs that developers love to use.” Fern has built a focused set of tools that reduce friction for developers consuming APIs. Fern Docs enables teams to create beautiful, customizable documentation that evolves alongside their API, while supporting modern docs-as-code workflows and enterprise deployment needs. The Fern SDK Generator help...

Percona donates its database provisioning platform OpenEverest to the CNCF

Percona announced it is open sourcing Everest, its platform for automated database provisioning and management, and donating it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Now called OpenEverest , the platform was redesigned to be modular, enabling users to mix and match database engines, storage backends, and deployment strategies. Several popular tools are already available as plugins, and the community will be able to easily build new plugins as well. “Want to integrate with your favorite monitoring tool? It’s a plugin. Need to sync data between database clusters of different vendors? Plugin. Custom backup solutions? Plugin. The modular architecture means you’re never locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem – mix and match the tools that work best for your needs,” OpenEverest’s website states. Percona does still plan to actively contribute to the project, and is establishing Solanica, a new company focused solely on developing OpenEverest and supporting its community. Addit...

XAML Studio is now open source

Microsoft has announced that it has open sourced XAML Studio , a developer tool that can be used to quickly prototype UWP XAML before adding code to Visual Studio. It provides a number of tools and resources for XAML development, including live editing and interacting, a binding debugger, a data context editor, the ability to auto-save and restore documents, IntelliSense, a documentation toolbox, alignment guides, and namespace helpers. XAML Studio started in 2017 as a prototype called XamlPad+, which was created during a hackathon to revive a number of past WPF tools. Its first commit was in 2018, at which point the name was changed to XAML Studio. It last public release was in 2019 with v1.1, and in 2020, the first attempts at open sourcing the project began. Some components of the tool were open sourced individually prior to the full platform being made open source, including the Monaco Editor Wrapper, SwitchPresenter, Sizer controls, Vertical Segmented, Adorners, and SelectedCon...

Microsoft to acquire Osmos to bolster Fabric platform

Microsoft has announced it is acquiring the agentic AI data engineering platform, Osmos . It plans to incorporate the new technology into its data platform Microsoft Fabric. According to Microsoft, Osmos’ AI agents turn raw data into analytics and AI-ready assets that can be used by OneLake, which is Fabric’s unified data lake. Microsoft says that this acquisition is part of the company’s overall mission of enabling its customers to unify their data and analytics into a single platform. “By bringing Osmos’s technology and team into Microsoft, we have the opportunity to accelerate what we’ve been building and deliver it to a far broader audience—directly where customers already operate their data platforms,” said Kirat Pandya, CEO of Osmos. Bogdan Crivat,  corporate vice president for Azure Data Analytics, added: “Today’s announcement reinforces Microsoft’s focus to help every organization unlock more value from their data faster and with greater simplicity. The Osmos team will ...

From SBOM to AI BOM: Rethinking supply chain security for AI native software

Most supply chain practitioners already understand the value of a Software Bill of Materials. SBOMs give you visibility into the libraries, frameworks, and dependencies that shape modern software, allowing you to respond quickly when vulnerabilities emerge. But as AI native systems become foundational to products and operations, the traditional SBOM model no longer captures the full scope of supply chain risk. Models, datasets, embeddings, orchestration layers, and third-party AI services now influence application behavior as much as source code. Treating these elements as out of scope creates blind spots that organizations can no longer afford. This shift is why the concept of an AI Bill of Materials is starting to matter. An AI BOM extends the logic of an SBOM to reflect how AI systems are actually built and operated. Instead of cataloging only software components, it records models and their versions, training and fine-tuning datasets, data sources and licenses, evaluation artifact...

December 2025: AI updates from the past month

Anthropic makes Skills an open standard Skills—a capability that allows users to teach Claude repeatable workflows—was first introduced in October, and now the company is making it an open standard. “Like MCP, we believe skills should be portable across tools and platforms—the same skill should work whether you’re using Claude or other AI platforms,” the company wrote in a blog post. Additionally, the company announced a directory of pre-built skills from companies like Notion, Canva, Figma, and Atlassian. Other new features, which vary by plan, include the ability to provision skills from admin settings and easier methods for creating and editing skills. OpenAI GPT-5.2-Codex released This is a version of GPT-5.2 that is optimized for the company’s coding agent Codex. It includes “improvements on long-horizon work through context compaction, stronger performance on large code changes like refactors and migrations, improved performance in Windows environments, and significantly st...

Agentic AI breaks out of the lab and forces enterprises to grow up

Enterprises are making faster progress with agentic AI than many expected, not because the tooling is mature, but because companies have realized they can’t afford to wait. The leading 10 to 20% of organizations are racing ahead, standing up internal “agent platforms” that handle planning, tool selection, long running memory, workflow coordination, and human in the loop approvals. Capabilities they once assumed off the shelf copilots would provide. They aren’t trying to become orchestration framework vendors; they’re filling gaps because enterprise needs for reliability, auditability, and policy enforcement are higher than what the current ecosystem offers. Yet despite these limitations, enterprises are making real, operational progress, not theoretical claims. They are learning, shaping patterns, and validating what will become the backbone of agentic systems for years to come. From Glue Code to Repeatable Patterns The first major stride is the shift from improvisation to repeatabl...

AI workslop: The golden touch that’s killing productivity

AI workslop is any AI-generated work that masquerades as professional output but lacks substance to advance any task meaningfully. If you’ve received a report that took you three reads to realize it said nothing, an email that used three paragraphs where one sentence would do, or a presentation with visually stunning slides containing zero actionable insight—congratulations, you’ve been workslopped. The $440,000 hallucination In July 2025, consulting giant Deloitte delivered a report to the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. The price tag: $440,000. The content: Chock-a-block with AI hallucinations: fabricated academic citations, false references, and a quote wrongly attributed to a Federal Court judgment. The message was clear: a major consulting firm had charged nearly half a million dollars for a report that couldn’t pass basic fact-checking. No surprise there, as LLMs are probabilistic machines trained to give *any* answer, even if incorrect, rather t...

The top software development news of the year

As 2025 comes to a close, SD Times is looking back at the top software development news stories of the year across the industry. Here are 10 of what we believe to be the biggest stories we covered throughout the year: Linux Foundation forms Agentic AI Foundation to be new home for MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md The Linux Foundation earlier this month announced that it is forming the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to promote transparent and collaborative evolution of agentic AI. Three major projects have been donated to the foundation at launch: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. Additionally, AAIF member Obot.ai will donate its MCP Dev Summit events and podcast to the foundation. The AAIF is launching with several members, including larger platinum members Amazon, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI; gold members Adyen, Arcade.dev, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, Ericsson, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Runlayer, SAP,...

Why AI isn’t replacing UX designers – it’s making them indispensable

I’ve been teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design for 18 years. This semester, for the first time, students lined up after my opening lecture, asking the same question: “What’s the role of AI in the design field? How do I prepare for this?” Their concerns mirror what I’m hearing from senior UX leaders across industries. And quite frankly, the narrative has been predictable: automation will eliminate jobs, compress budgets, and reduce the need for human designers. However, new data my team collected from 500 senior managers across the U.S., UK, and Germany tells a different story than the anxiety suggests. AI isn’t replacing UX professionals. Instead, it shows signs of elevating them to strategic status and making their roles more critical than ever. UX has crossed into recession-proof territory For years, UX lived in a precarious position during economic downturns. When budgets tightened, design was often among the first areas to face cuts. That’s changing. Our research shows...

Our top trending opinion and analysis articles from the past year

Articles about AI dominated media coverage in 2025, as the ability to perform more than just rudimentary tasks grew into making software development life cycle processes autonomous. The widespread piloting and implementation of generative AI, agents and MCP servers were among the topics that produced the top trending articles on sdtimes.com this year. But AI wasn’t the only thing on the minds of developers and their managers. Here’s a look at the top trending stories on sdtimes.com for 2025. The most-viewed article this year asked the question: “ Is Agile Dead in the Age of AI? ” Author Adam Sandman, CEO of Inflectra, posited that Agile processes are in fact not dead, but are evolving. “The future of software development isn’t Agile vs. AI, it’s Agile with AI. Strategic alignment, mentorship, and smart governance make sure that AI’s power enhances safety, maintainability, and long-term product value.,” he wrote. No. 2: 88% of companies are contemplating leaving Oracle Java SD Time...

Why flaky tests are increasing, and what you can do about it

Flaky tests have long been a source of wasted engineering time for mobile development teams, but recent data shows they are becoming something more serious: a growing drag on delivery speed. As AI-driven code generation accelerates and pipelines absorb far greater volumes of output, test instability is no longer an occasional nuisance. This constant rise has been recorded by all manner of developers, from small teams to Google and Microsoft . The recently launched Bitrise Mobile Insights report backs up this shift with hard numbers: the likelihood of encountering a flaky test rose from 10% in 2022 to 26% in 2025. Practically, this means that the average mobile development team now encounters unreliable test results during a typical workflow run. That level of unpredictability has real consequences for organizations that depend on fast, confident release cycles. Flaky tests undermine trust in CI/CD infrastructure, force developers to repeat work and introduce friction at the point wh...

AI predictions for 2026

As this year comes to a close, many experts have begun to look ahead to next year. Here are several predictions for trends in AI in 2026. Ariel Katz, CEO of Sisense From agent hype to outcome accountability 2025 was the year agents exploded; 2026 is the year enterprises demand proof they actually work. After millions spent on tokens, tools, and experiments that never reached production, companies shift from buying AI components to buying measurable business outcomes. The winners will offer outcome-as-a-service – owning the workflow, the integration, the semantics, and the last mile – because customers won’t pay for agents. They’ll pay for certainty.   Andrew Sellers, VP of technology strategy and enablement at Confluent 2026 will see new protocols for multi-agent coordination and metadata exchange Two critical standards are likely to emerge in 2026 as AI operations become autonomous. First, as single-agent systems evolve into complex multi-agent teams, the industry needs a...