TechFinitive

14/10/2026

Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure do not need to steal data or disable systems to cause damage. Manipulating a sensor reading or operational command can be enough to disrupt a physical process, a risk that grows as industrial operators connect legacy equipment to cloud platforms and AI systems.

Thomas Plank, CEO of Tributech, argues that organisations must look beyond who can access their networks and establish whether the data and commands flowing between equipment, IT systems and AI models can be trusted. With AI agents increasingly able to change configurations and adjust equipment settings, proving data integrity is becoming both an operational and regulatory concern.

Tributech addresses this through cryptographic data verification and secure remote commands. Its collaboration with IBM is intended to bring these capabilities to industrial organisations globally, combining Tributech’s technology with IBM Consulting’s security expertise. The aim is to help operators protect data across connected environments, including assets communicating over cellular and satellite networks, without having to replace existing infrastructure wholesale.

In this interview, Plank discusses why Zero Trust needs to extend to operational data, how organisations can adopt AI without increasing the risk of physical disruption, and why proving data authenticity is becoming a board-level responsibility. Read it here: https://www.techfinitive.com/interviews/thomas-plank-ceo-of-tributech-blind-trust-is-exactly-what-an-attacker-who-manipulates-data-relies-on/

Thomas Plank, CEO of Tributech explores why operational data manipulation and AI threats pose new risks to critical infrastructure security, and how Zero Trust must evolve.

14/10/2026

Imagine an airport where every runway has its own control tower. Each tower runs its own radar, keeps its own logbook, and follows its own rules. Every air traffic controller sees a slice of the sky, but nobody sees the whole picture.

Believe it or not, that is how many organisations, including Fortune 500 companies, secure AI today. One tool discovers apps, another watches cloud posture, a third polices employee prompts, and a fourth tracks agents.

Abnormal AI is making the case for a single control tower.

The company has expanded its AI security suite around the same behavioural platform that underpins its email and identity protection. AI Governance, which discovers sanctioned and unsanctioned AI use and supports policy, spend visibility, and audit evidence, is generally available now.

AI Cloud Security, AI Employee Guardrails, AI Agent Security, and AI Security Workbench are in private preview, with general availability planned for Q4 2026.

Full story here: https://www.techfinitive.com/features/abnormal-ais-expanded-security-suite-asks-the-question-whats-the-true-cost-of-fragmented-security/

Abnormal AI expands its security suite to unify fragmented enterprise AI governance, cutting duplicate costs and closing security blind spots.

14/10/2026

The modern enterprise is currently caught in a fascinating, albeit expensive, illusion. Over the last eighteen months, the narrative surrounding agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominated by triumphant press releases and internal celebration. On paper, pilots are flying. Agents are summarising complex contracts, drafting compliance briefs, and auto-approving low-tier procurement requests with astonishing speed. Business unit leaders are declaring victory, pointing to successful initial runs where autonomous workflows completed their assigned tasks without a single system-level crash.

Yet, if you look under the hood at actual enterprise-wide deployments, a glaring gap emerges. Gartner’s 2026 CIO Survey revealed a stark disconnect: While roughly 75% of technology leaders claim some form of agentic AI adoption, only about 11% are running truly production-ready systems, and just 17% have deployed agents at scale.

Enterprise AI strategy is stalling because there is a massive gap between how much AI companies claim to use and what actually works in daily operations. The uncomfortable truth leadership teams face today is that a successful pilot is not proof of production readiness; it is merely proof that an autonomous model can function under engineered, highly artificial conditions.

Read the full Opinion article by Anand B Narasimhan here: https://www.techfinitive.com/opinions/from-pilot-to-production-why-most-agentic-ai-projects-stall-before-scale/

Agentic AI pilots may succeed while production deployments stall. Discover why governance, data quality and accountability matter when scaling AI.

13/10/2026

Ask a finance team what keeps them up at night, and the answer is rarely the payment itself. It is everything that happens after the money moves. As stablecoins drift out of crypto trading desks and into the accounts-payable queue, that is definitely something worth remembering.

Visa says about 17% of its stablecoin-linked card volume in fiscal 2026 to date came from business and commercial card programmes. It now supports more than 160 such programmes, and payment volume across them grew nearly 200% year on year.

Handy numbers, but read them carefully.

That 17% is a slice of Visa’s own stablecoin-linked card volume, sorted using Visa’s internal programme classifications. It tells us nothing about how much of global business spending now runs on stablecoins.

So treat it as a weathervane, not a census.

Story here: https://www.techfinitive.com/features/the-real-story-behind-visas-growing-stablecoin-numbers/

As stablecoin use surges in corporate payments, finance teams face new pressures around treasury controls, reconciliation, and audit compliance.

13/10/2026

Most businesses start with simple accounting software to handle invoices, expenses and basic financial reporting. But as they grow, so do their requirements. More customers mean more transactions, new products bring inventory challenges, and additional departments need access to information that one or two people previously managed.

Before long, staff are exporting data into spreadsheets, manually reconciling figures and developing workarounds to compensate for things their software can’t do.

Jason Tassie, an entrepreneur who founded financial comparison platform Know Your Business, says these workarounds are often the clearest indication that a business has outgrown its systems.

“The biggest warning sign isn’t that your software is slow or old. It’s that you’ve started employing human beings to compensate for it,” he says. “Growing businesses are very good at creating invisible jobs around inadequate systems.”

Here are four signs that your existing software might be holding your business back: https://www.techfinitive.com/features/killer-signs-that-your-current-accounting-software-is-holding-your-sme-back/

The accounting software that helped launch your business might not be equipped to handle its next stage of growth: here are the warning signs

12/10/2026

Is this the future of 3D design? 🤯✨

We got our hands on Lenovo’s interactive snap-on pads and gesture recognition technology! Just snap a pad onto the lower display to tweak 3D lighting, adjust model tints, or use wrist rotations and two-handed gestures to rotate and zoom through virtual space in real time.

No mouse, no stylus, just total creative control!

🔗 For more tech news, visit https://www.techfinitive.com

12/10/2026

Advertising Week New York always attracts the brightest media minds, with over 500 sessions to choose from. AI continues to dominate this year, with one of the most interesting sessions hosted by R-ai Technologies entitled “Nobody Builds Trust Alone“. Its key tenet: that AI’s value will only be realised when everyone involved has implicit trust in the system. Efficiency savings alone aren’t enough.

R-ai Founder and CEO Izzie Rivers kicked off the session with a reveal: R-ai is ready for action. “It’s an agent enterprise platform for clients to plan, activate and report on their integrated media programmes,” she said. “We’ve been building it in stealth for two years. It’s just coming out of stealth now.”

But Rivers is fully aware that marketers aren’t looking for a black box solution, which is why building trust was such a key theme.

Story here: https://www.techfinitive.com/features/nobody-builds-trust-alone-what-it-takes-to-make-marketers-and-publishers-trust-ai/

AdWeek New York 2026 is packed with sessions on the impact of AI, including this fascinating panel on how to build trust in AI platforms

12/10/2026

While Donald Trump wants to rebrand Artificial Intelligence as Super Intelligence, one big takeaway from Advertising Week New York is that we need trust more than superpowers. We saw this in our first article, Nobody builds trust alone, and it was hammered home in a briefing hosted by Snowflake entitled “What AI Agents Need Before They Touch a Media Decision“.

The core argument: that before AI agents make media decisions, organisations need to bake in context, structure their data and establish both governance and human oversight. Only by doing so can you give your employees those much-sought AI superpowers.

“Your agents are going to understand the context of the signals to be able to act on it responsibly, but we have to think a lot about how we actually bring those signals into a platform and start to think about how we govern and create that context at scale,” said Snowflake’s Erin Foxworthy, who hosted Michael Treon (PMG) and Jason Dailey (Meta) at the panel.

Story here:

Before AI agents make media decisions, organisations need to bake in context, structure data and establish both governance and human oversight

12/10/2026

Compliance has long been treated as if it were another function of the security organisation. It reports through security leadership, is managed by GRC teams, funded from security budgets, and measured by security outcomes. That structure makes sense on paper. Strong security programs are what make successful audits possible, and security teams naturally become the stewards of compliance efforts.

The problem is that many organisations have mistaken ownership for purpose, argues Rick Orloff, CISSP, CAPI in his latest opinion piece:https://www.techfinitive.com/opinions/unwinding-compliances-role-why-compliance-doesnt-belong-to-security-alone/

Compliance strategy shouldn’t sit with security alone. Explore why sales, finance, engineering and leadership all have a role in defining its value.

12/10/2026

Have you just vibe coded a dashboard and given yourself a pat on the back for your cleverness? Not so fast, says Derek Slager, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Amperity. “Yes, anybody can trivially vibe code a dashboard or an app,” he concedes in this Conversations on AI interview, “but what does that look like six months later after 50-100 AI additions?” The answer is that no-one knows. Which is why expertise still matters.

There’s certainly shortage of expertise at Amperity. The company, founded a decade ago, describes itself as “the AI-powered Customer Data Cloud that helps brands act on real-time customer context”. And it’s used by many famous brands, including DICK’s Sporting Goods, Virgin Atlantic and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

You’ll notice the phrase “AI-powered” in Amperity’s description, and it’s clear that Derek isn’t always impressed by companies that use the term loosely. “The companies using AI to create real customer value are getting paid for it, because it correlates to business results,” he says. And merely boosting workflows by a few percentage points doesn’t impress him: it’s just not worth paying for.

It’s also fascinating to hear Derek’s take on what separates the companies that are thriving in this AI era and those who aren’t. Often the ones who “throw out what was working and replace it with what they expect to work in the near future”, he says.

But don’t confuse this with abandoning the data that sits beneath any successful model. “Building a strong data foundation to enable models to perform well will likely continue to be the single best investment a company can make in the AI era,” says Derek.

The good news is that Derek is a man who chooses his words wisely. Reading this interview should only take you three minutes. And it may well be the best three minutes you spend all day.

Read the full interview here: https://www.techfinitive.com/interviews/derek-slager-co-founder-co-ceo-at-amperity/

Amperity co-CEO Derek Slager explores AI's true impact on software, enterprise misconceptions, and how intelligent agents are reshaping modern work