Artificial intelligence news for the week of July 18; updates from Akka, IBM, OutSystems & more

Navigating the AI Revolution: Key Innovations and Strategic Insights from July 2025

The artificial intelligence landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace. This roundup highlights the most impactful AI news from the week of July 18, 2025, focusing on innovations reshaping development, operations, and business strategy.

The Rise of Agentic AI and Automated Workflows

A significant trend is the emergence of agentic AI platforms for streamlined development and automation. Akka launched its Agentic AI Platform, promising three times faster development at a third of the compute cost by integrating orchestration, agents, memory, and streaming. This platform is ideal for autonomous edge deployments and real-time analytics.

Similarly, Atos debuted its Polaris AI Platform, a comprehensive system of autonomous AI agents orchestrating workflows for development, testing, and IT operations, enabling business process automation at scale with built-in learning capabilities.

Further demonstrating this shift, an OutSystems report reveals 93 percent of organizations are developing or planning tailored AI agents. This trend reshapes workforce skills, streamlines processes, and facilitates agile innovation, fostering an AI-first mindset for digital transformation.

Optimizing AI Infrastructure and Data Access

Robust infrastructure and seamless data access are foundational for advanced AI. C-Gen.AI launched an AI infrastructure platform to address rising cloud costs, poor GPU utilization, and vendor lock-in. It optimizes GPU usage across environments, unlocking idle resources and accelerating scalable AI deployments.

For observability, Coralogix introduced MCP Server, providing AI agents direct, secure access to streaming observability data. This automates incident detection, troubleshooting, and operational optimization, leading to more intelligent and reliable systems.

Honeycomb also debuted its MCP (Model Context Protocol) in the AWS Marketplace AI Agents and Tools category. MCP aids enterprises in securely connecting, orchestrating, and managing AI agents in the cloud, streamlining deployment and governance.

For multimodal AI app development, Qdrant introduced Qdrant Cloud Inference. This managed service simplifies generating, storing, and indexing vector embeddings for unstructured data (text, images) within one environment. It reduces complexity and latency, accelerating deployment of search and RAG systems for AI assistants.

Enhanced AI Capabilities Across Industries

AI's reach is expanding, bringing enhanced capabilities and efficiencies across various sectors. Esri and Microsoft partnered to integrate powerful new AI features into ArcGIS, empowering users with advanced spatial analysis and deeper generative AI tools for richer geospatial insights.

Concentric AI secured its fifth and sixth U.S. patents of 2025, affirming its leadership in data-centric security and AI-driven risk management. Their innovations focus on automatically identifying, classifying, and protecting sensitive content across enterprise data stores.

Kognitos and qBotica are collaborating to offer "English as Code" process automation, enabling business users to define workflows in plain English. This significantly lowers adoption barriers, accelerating digital transformation in finance, HR, and beyond.

LogicMonitor launched Edwin AI in the AWS Marketplace, providing intelligent, conversational assistance to automate IT operations, surface actionable insights, and accelerate mean time to resolution for AWS customers.

Progress Software acquired Nuclia, an innovator in agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI. This acquisition enhances Progress’s AI portfolio with advanced data discovery and conversational intelligence, bolstering AI-powered automation.

Strategic Imperatives: Leadership, Innovation, and Adoption

Broader trends are shaping AI adoption. IBM’s research highlights the growing impact of Chief AI Officers (CAIOs): organizations with CAIOs report 10% higher ROI on AI investments and are 24% more likely to outperform peers in innovation. Most enterprises are expected to appoint CAIOs within two years, underscoring their pivotal role.

Intel and the Weizmann Institute unveiled algorithms that supercharge large language models by up to 2.8x using "speculative decoding." This method allows small and large AI models to collaborate without retraining specialized draft models, making industry-grade AI acceleration more accessible.

A Nutanix survey on GenAI in financial services showed widespread implementation but identified significant challenges: skills gaps and infrastructure limitations. While containers and hybrid cloud enable adoption, 97% of firms acknowledge more is needed for efficient GenAI operations.

Despite increased investment, a Redwood Software study found that 73% of businesses boosted automation spending, yet many tools remain underutilized. This highlights ongoing complexity and integration challenges preventing full realization of AI and process transformation potential.

Expert Insights for Your AI Journey

Staying ahead in the AI space requires continuous learning. Our community, Insight Jam, offers expert advice, best practices, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

• AI Road to Better Data Integration: AI can simplify data integration, critical for business success. Experts recently discussed the latest AI-driven capabilities.
• Building an AI-Ready Network: While leadership mandates AI, 95% of network teams operate reactively. Preparing for AI demands "near-perfect" network performance. Learn to mature your network observability practice from hyper-reactive to automated for an AI-ready infrastructure.
• The Future of AI Adoption: IBM’s Bruno Aziza noted only 16% of organizations achieve enterprise-scale AI. Success stories illustrate the power of orchestrating AI agents at scale.
• Beyond AI: Douglas Laney's perspective on Artificial Superintelligence emphasizes the transformative economic operations AI enables, far beyond current conceptions.

These innovations and insights underscore a critical message: AI is a strategic imperative demanding thoughtful infrastructure, skilled leadership, and a clear understanding of its potential and challenges. Embrace these advancements to drive your organization’s digital transformation.