Analysis, surveys, Reports - August 2025 to December 2025

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Click here for our previous curation that goes through July 2025.

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SiliconANGLE - Fastly report finds AI bots are reshaping the balance of web traffic

In terms of which companies are doing what, Meta Platforms Inc. leads the crawler category at 52% of observed traffic, followed by Google LLC at 23% and OpenAI at 20%. Despite ranking third in request volume, OpenAI’s GPTBot covered the widest share of unique websites, indexing 95% of all domains observed in the study.

AI

VentureBeat - Hugging Face: 5 ways enterprises can slash AI costs without sacrificing performance

Distillation is key here; a full model could initially be trained from scratch and then refined for a specific task. DeepSeek R1, for instance, is “so huge that most organizations can’t afford to use it” because you need at least 8 GPUs, Luccioni noted. By contrast, distilled versions can be 10, 20 or even 30X smaller and run on a single GPU.

AI

Computerworld - Questionable AI work habits rampant among US firms

Of note, it said, “half (50%) of executives say they’d prefer AI managers over a human, although 34% aren’t entirely sure they can tell the difference between an AI agent and a real employee. Over a third of business leaders (38%) admit they don’t know what an AI agent is — the highest of any role. Almost the same proportion (35%) of C-suite executives said they have submitted proprietary company information so AI could complete a task for them.”

AI

VentureBeat - That ‘cheap’ open-source AI model is actually burning through your compute budget

The research, conducted by AI firm Nous Research, found that open-weight models use between 1.5 to 4 times more tokens — the basic units of AI computation — than closed models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. For simple knowledge questions, the gap widened dramatically, with some open models using up to 10 times more tokens.

AI

VentureBeat - Study warns of security risks as ‘OS agents’ gain control of computers and phones

The survey, led by researchers from Zhejiang University and OPPO AI Center, comes as major technology companies race to deploy AI agents that can perform complex digital tasks. OpenAI recently launched “Operator,” Anthropic released “Computer Use,” Apple introduced enhanced AI capabilities in “Apple Intelligence,” and Google unveiled “Project Mariner” — all systems designed to automate computer interactions.

AI

Forbes - New Study Shows AI Is AI Biased Toward AI. 10 Steps To Protect Yourself

In the digital landscape of 2025, where artificial intelligence generates everything from news articles to marketing copy, a troubling pattern has emerged: AI systems consistently favor content created by other AI systems over human-written text. This "self-preference bias" isn’t just a technical curiosity — it's reshaping how information flows through our digital ecosystem, often in ways we don't even realize.

AI Ethics

ZDNet - Gen AI disillusionment looms, according to Gartner's 2025 Hype Cycle report

Gartner said multimodal AI and risk management infrastructure, despite also "dominating the Peak of Inflated Expectations," each show promise with fewer caveats. Both will be adopted by the mainstream in the next five years and "will enable more robust, innovative and responsible AI applications, transforming how businesses and organizations operate."

AI

The Hacker News - AI Slashes Workloads for vCISOs by 68% as SMBs Demand More – New Report Reveals

vCISO offerings provide a flexible, cost-effective way for organizations to access high-level cybersecurity expertise without the overhead of a full-time executive. And with a growing number of attacks alongside the growing awareness of the importance of cybersecurity, it's no surprise that demand for vCISO services is skyrocketing among SMBs. Demand for vCISO services is outpacing even compliance readiness and cyber insurance support.

Security

ZDNet - How AI amplifies these other tech trends that matter most to business in 2025

The healthiest companies of the future are autonomous companies. Autonomous companies utilize a hybrid workforce, embracing AI-first strategies and digital labor to scale speed, scale, and intelligence. When done right, AI agents will unlock unprecedented value creation opportunities with non-linear positive impact that can only be realized via autonomous AI agents.  

Tech Trends

Network World - SD-WAN reality check: Why enterprise ‘rip-and-replace’ isn’t happening

The market is fairly mature, and SD-WAN deployments are now nearly ubiquitous among large enterprises, according to ISG’s 2025 Provider Lens Network Software-defined Solutions and Services report. Small and medium-sized businesses are also showing growing adoption. But one deployment trend that hasn’t take off is the full-blown, rip-and-replacement of legacy networks.

Network Management

Dark Reading - Threat Actors Increasingly Leaning on GenAI Tools

Moreover, organizations' increasing integration of AI means threat actors have a new attack surface to exploit. CrowdStrike highlighted how, in April, it saw multiple threat actors exploit a Langflow AI vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-3248 to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution. Langflow AI is a popular tool used for building AI agents.

Security

Information Week - Executives and Employees Aren’t on the Same Page With AI

But if you dig deeper, cracks begin to show. Only 32% of learning and development respondents believe their current training programs are effectively closing verified skills gaps. When you ask employees for their view, the confidence drops off a cliff.

AI

Dark Reading - SIEMs: Dying a Slow Death or Poised for AI Rebirth?

In a recent online poll, Dark Reading asked readers about the future of security information and event management (SIEM) platforms in security operations. With more than 1,400 responses, 40% said SIEMs should be folded into extended detection and response (XDR) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms or other security tools, while 35% said the product category still has legs as it incorporates AI and modernizes.

Security

Forbes - How ‘Vibe Coding’ Is Creating A New AI Economy

This is the story of the moment. AI is redefining entrepreneurship, allowing people with a vision and cultural understanding — but not necessarily computer-science degrees — to ship platform-level products. But questions are mounting: Can this new model of entrepreneurship scale beyond prototype success without deeper engineering muscle?

AI

SiliconANGLE - Cloud breaches and identity hacks explode in CrowdStrike’s latest threat report

Headlining the report was a finding that interactive intrusions rose 27% year-over-year between July 2024 and June 2025, with a highly surprising 81% of attacks found to be malware-free. CrowdStrike said the shift away from leading with malware signals a move toward stealthier techniques such as credential abuse, lateral movement and defense evasion.

Security

ITPro Today - The Resilience Paradox: Why 90% of IT Teams Overestimate Their Operational Readiness

Confidence vs. Reality Gap: 90% of IT professionals describe their organizations as resilient, yet fewer than half feel confident handling core challenges like BYOD policies (26%), AI integration (38%), and remote workforce management (45%).

IT Management

InfoWorld - Dedicated servers outpace public clouds for AI

The core promise of the public cloud—“pay only for what you use”—can become a double-edged sword for AI. High-performance AI systems rely on specialized hardware, such as Nvidia GPUs or TPUs, which are costly to rent and often underutilized without continuous workload optimization. Furthermore, many AI tasks require scaling across fleets of compute instances, a process that generates additional expenses for network traffic, storage retrieval, and latency reduction.

Cloud

Computerworld - Apple’s results show the Windows-to-Mac switch is happening

It seems clear the forced need to upgrade Windows is motivating many business users to move to the Mac instead. This trend has been ongoing for some time, but seems to have become even more apparent in recent months — Apple’s most recent quarterly financial call confirmed double-digit growth in Mac sales during Q3 ’25.

IT Management

ZDNet - Anthropic beats OpenAI as the top LLM provider for business - and it's not even close

In other words, Menlo Ventures has billions of reasons to praise Anthropic. That said, others also view Anthropic as the top enterprise AI company. As AI Magazine put it, "Anthropic has established itself as the premier enterprise AI company through its Claude family of LLMs, achieving remarkable 1,000% year-over-year growth to reach $3 billion in annual recurring revenue." Even by hyper-aggressive AI standards, that's real growth.  

LLM

Information Week - 2026 Budgets: What’s on Top of CIOs’ Lists (and What Should Be)

So much competitive advantage is going to whether or not you have full-stack engineering capability with cyber and cloud AI embedded. “Have you invested in tooling and platforms, so your teams don't have to do everything from environments and pre-configured cloud hosting to the tool chain for your full CI/CD?” Briggs asks.

IT Management