Financial fraud has always evolved with technology, but the rise of generative AI has supercharged the arms race. Enter Mitek Systems, the NASDAQ-listed identity verification firm, which just picked up a silver medal in Datos Insights’ 2025 Fraud and AML Impact Awards for its work in digital identity defense. The recognition goes to Digital Fraud Defender, Mitek’s security suite engineered to block the latest wave of AI-powered fraud—everything from deepfakes to synthetic IDs to injection attacks.

Traditional fraud detection often leaned heavily on “liveness” checks—making sure a selfie was from a real human, in real time. But as deepfake tech matures, those methods fall short. Mitek’s bet is that the only way forward is multi-layered protection.

Digital Fraud Defender’s toolkit includes:

• Deepfake detection using both visual artifacts and metadata analysis.

• Injection attack detection to spot manipulated or unauthorized video streams.

• Template attack detection that flags patterns tied to recycled fake documents.

• Purple Team adversarial testing, where ethical hackers stress-test the system to anticipate real-world threats.

It’s a mix of machine learning, metadata scrutiny, and proactive red teaming—a layered defense aimed at keeping fraudsters a step behind.

Battle-Tested in the Wild

The tech isn’t just theory. Mitek says Digital Fraud Defender has already exposed high-volume fraud campaigns that slipped past traditional filters. In one phishing-driven attack, the system caught 3,000+ injection attempts before they reached customers. In another, it kept a 99% biometric verification pass rate while filtering out AI-generated imposters.

That balance—catching bad actors without frustrating legitimate users—is key. Too much friction and customers walk. Too little, and the fraud bill spikes.

Industry Context: Deepfakes Meet Finance

Generative AI tools have made it alarmingly easy to spin up convincing fake IDs, manipulated documents, and cloned faces. For financial institutions, the risk is existential: onboarding one synthetic identity can lead to cascading fraud across accounts, loans, and payment rails.

Datos Insights’ Jim Mortensen summed it up: “Organizations can no longer rely on single-point solutions when facing increasingly sophisticated attack vectors.”

Translation: if your fraud prevention strategy still hinges on a selfie blink test, you’re already behind.

Fraud prevention is becoming as much about anticipation as detection. By combining detection with proactive adversarial testing, Mitek is signaling a shift toward pre-emptive resilience in digital identity.

As Chris Briggs, Mitek’s chief product officer, put it: “Liveness detection alone is not enough. That’s why we’ve layered protections to stay ahead of AI-driven threats. Recognition from Datos Insights validates that this approach is setting a new standard in fraud prevention.”

With fraudsters arming themselves with open-source AI and deepfake kits, solutions like Mitek’s may soon move from “nice-to-have” to baseline requirement. And with regulators increasingly eyeing financial institutions’ ability to handle digital fraud, multilayered defenses could also become a compliance necessity.

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Security operations centers don’t just drown in alerts—they drown in data. With attack surfaces expanding across AI, cloud, SaaS, and on-prem, SOCs are increasingly forced to choose between ballooning SIEM bills or leaving critical telemetry logs on the cutting-room floor. CeTu thinks that’s a false choice.

The company, recognized in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2025, has made its agentless, no-code SecOps data management platform available on the AWS Marketplace. The move makes procurement easier for enterprise teams while putting unspent AWS credits to work.

The Data Flood Problem

Modern SOCs ingest petabytes of telemetry—from AWS CloudTrail logs to VPC Flow Logs and beyond. Yet the costs of shoving everything into a traditional SIEM often prove unsustainable. Many organizations now skip ingesting key security logs altogether, creating dangerous blind spots.

Onboarding new AI apps doesn’t help, introducing a flood of non-standard log formats that require scarce expertise to normalize and correlate. The result: more complexity, more risk, and slower incident response.

CeTu’s Pitch: AI-Powered Data Pipelines

Instead of treating security data as an expense line, CeTu is reframing it as an opportunity. The platform builds dynamic telemetry pipelines that normalize, filter, enrich, and route logs across destinations—from high-performance SIEMs to cost-friendly Amazon S3 buckets or Amazon Security Lake.

Key features include:

• Automation for the modern SOC: Optimize ingestion across SIEMs, data lakes, and storage to cut costs by as much as 80%.

• Security-aware AI: Continuously monitors for blind spots and data quality issues, turning hidden threats into visible signals.

• No-code workflows: Designed for everyday engineers, enabling time-to-value in days, not months.

• AWS-native procurement: Streamlined billing and compliance, with the option to use AWS credits.

“The SOC is evolving, and CeTu is accelerating that transformation,” said CeTu CEO Omer Schneider. “Security teams shouldn’t have to choose between cutting costs and strengthening defenses. CeTu changes that equation.”

Gartner recently noted that telemetry pipelines have entered the “early mainstream” phase of adoption, validating a shift toward smarter data management in cybersecurity. CeTu’s AWS Marketplace debut underscores this trend, positioning it against both pipeline-first vendors like Cribl and broader security analytics players like Splunk.

For enterprises, the appeal is twofold: cut SIEM costs without cutting visibility, and gain a more intelligent defense posture that can adapt to emerging threats like deepfake-driven fraud and AI-powered attacks.

With CeTu now one click away in AWS Marketplace, the pressure is on other SecOps vendors to match its mix of cost efficiency and security-aware intelligence.

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If you thought “process automation” was already running at full throttle, Appian just pressed the turbo button. The company rolled out a batch of AI-driven enhancements designed to make enterprise workflows faster, smarter, and more secure—particularly for data-heavy industries and government customers.

At the heart of this release are four upgrades: semantic smart search, AI availability for self-managed and FedRAMP environments, automatic data fabric scaling, and embedded Process HQ reports. Taken together, they reinforce Appian’s pitch as the platform where AI isn’t just a bolt-on feature but the backbone of how work gets done.

AI Search That Understands You (Not Just Your Keywords)

Forget keyword guessing games. Appian’s upgraded AI smart search uses semantic understanding to return results based on intent, not just exact terms. Tied into the company’s “data fabric,” which unifies millions of records and documents across systems, this makes searching more like asking a colleague who knows where everything is filed. Think fewer dead ends and more context-aware results—useful for customer support cases, underwriting, or any workflow where finding the right detail fast matters.

AI Access for Everyone—Even Government

One of the quieter but more impactful shifts: Appian AI is now fully available in self-managed and FedRAMP environments. Translation? Federal agencies and security-sensitive industries can finally tap into enterprise-grade AI without worrying about compliance roadblocks. In a market where rivals like ServiceNow and IBM are chasing the same contracts, Appian is clearly angling to make itself the “safe bet” for regulated sectors.

Data Fabric That Scales Itself

Enterprise IT teams will appreciate the new data fabric autoscaling. Instead of tweaking capacity by hand, Appian automatically scales to handle heavier query loads. That means high-volume use cases—say, insurance claims or financial risk models—keep running smoothly without admins playing catch-up. Add in asynchronous interface loading (which quietly shuffles slow data into the background), and end users see snappier apps with less lag.

Process Insights Without the IT Bottleneck

Process HQ, Appian’s tool for spotting bottlenecks and inefficiencies, now embeds directly into Appian Sites. End users can explore dashboards, drill down into data, and share insights without calling IT for help. For managers, that means bottleneck-busting insights are just a click away, no tickets required.

Appian’s release isn’t about flashy AI demos—it’s about quietly solving the headaches that make enterprise automation brittle: siloed data, compliance friction, sluggish apps, and reporting bottlenecks. In an environment where CIOs are under pressure to show measurable ROI on AI investments, Appian’s “secure, scalable, and useful” approach could resonate.

Michael Beckley, Appian’s CTO, put it bluntly: “We’re delivering AI with guardrails and transparency, without compromising on security or control.”

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Legacy observability platforms are starting to look like flip phones in a 5G world—functional, but painfully behind the times. Crest Data thinks it has the fix. The company just unveiled its Migration Acceleration Service for Datadog, a new offering designed to slash migration timelines by up to 60%, helping enterprises trade their clunky monitoring stacks for Datadog’s slick, unified observability and security platform.

The observability market has been shifting fast. With cloud-native environments growing more complex, legacy SIEM and monitoring tools often can’t keep up—leaving enterprises paying high costs for underwhelming visibility. Datadog, on the other hand, has steadily become the poster child for modern observability. The hitch? Migrating is usually a nightmare.

That’s where Crest Data steps in. “Many enterprises want to move to Datadog but the migration is slowed by the complexity of converting dashboards, alerts, and workflows from legacy systems,” said Malhar Shah, Crest Data’s Co-founder & CEO. “Our Migration Acceleration Service eliminates that friction.”

How It Works

The service uses a phased approach powered by Crest’s Automated Migration Engine, which automatically converts up to 90% of dashboards, alerts, and workflows into Datadog-native formats. The last 10% gets manual fine-tuning by Crest’s experts—ensuring enterprises don’t end up with half-baked dashboards.

Early adopters say the time savings are real. “What would otherwise have taken several months can now be completed within a few weeks,” said Marylu Velazquez, Sales Director at TecnoMedia, noting that automation not only accelerates the process but also reduces risk and cost.

Datadog itself seems pleased with the partnership. “Helping customers move to Datadog's unified platform while further accelerating migration is a win-win for everyone,” said Jarrod Buckley, VP of Channels & Alliances at Datadog.

Crest’s timing is strategic. As enterprises face pressure to modernize IT infrastructure while trimming budgets, a fast lane to Datadog could be appealing. Rival observability vendors like Splunk and New Relic are also scrambling to show value amid rising competition from Datadog’s all-in-one platform. By positioning itself as the migration enabler, Crest Data isn’t just hitching its wagon to Datadog—it’s putting itself in the middle of one of the hottest tech shifts in enterprise IT.

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Breaking down language barriers has long been a dream in business communications. Krisp, best known for its real-time voice AI, is making that dream far less sci-fi with the launch of AI Voice Translation v2.0. The updated platform introduces a set of heavy-hitting upgrades—Synchronous mode, Auto-scoring, Custom Prompts, and Language Auto-detection—designed to make multilingual conversations faster, smoother, and more human.

If that sounds like a direct shot at the pain points of call centers and global enterprises, that’s because it is.

Real-Time Conversations Without the Lag

At the heart of the upgrade is Synchronous mode, which essentially eliminates the awkward pauses and delays that usually plague translated conversations. Instead of waiting for a third-party interpreter—or worse, fumbling with pre-scripted translations—both sides can now speak in their native language and hear instant translations with minimal lag. Think less “robotic exchange,” more “normal conversation.”

Quality Control, Automated

Manual call sampling for compliance and quality checks has long been a thorn in the side of support teams. Krisp’s Auto-scoring tackles this head-on by automatically evaluating every translated call. That means no more cherry-picked samples, and far fewer compliance slip-ups.

A Smarter, Branded Experience

The platform also lets companies personalize the customer journey through Custom Prompts—pre-recorded, brand-specific intros that keep the tone consistent across markets. Add to that Language Auto-detection, which identifies the customer’s language within seconds, and you have a system designed to make translation feel invisible.

For industries where precision is non-negotiable—say, healthcare, finance, or travel—Krisp introduces Customer Vocabulary, enabling teams to preload domain-specific terms to avoid embarrassing mistranslations. Numbers, IDs, and even sensitive data like PII get handled with an accuracy bump of 5–10 BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) points.

Industry Implications

The timing couldn’t be better. According to CMP Research, customers increasingly prefer automated voice interactions, especially when speed and personalization are in play. Krisp’s bet is that real-time translation will shift from a “nice-to-have” to a standard expectation in global contact centers. With support for 80+ languages and enterprise-grade security, Krisp is positioning itself as the go-to for distributed teams and high-volume ops.

Competitors in the space, from Big Tech speech APIs to niche language service providers, may need to rethink their approach. Human interpreters won’t vanish overnight, but when AI can offer instant, natural-sounding, multilingual conversations—without scheduling headaches—businesses will likely take the faster, cheaper route.

As Krisp’s CEO Davit Baghdasaryan put it, this isn’t just about translation. It’s about faster resolutions, stronger relationships, and giving customer support teams superpowers.

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IntelePeer has made its SmartAnalytics platform available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, opening up new access for enterprises looking to enhance their conversational AI insights within the Azure ecosystem.

SmartAnalytics, already bundled with IntelePeer’s SmartAgent and SmartOffice solutions, provides real-time data insights, interaction analysis, and compliance monitoring designed to optimize both AI and human customer interactions.

Frank Fawzi, CEO of IntelePeer, called the listing a major milestone. “Being listed in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace makes it easier than ever for customers to access and deploy our SmartAnalytics solution within their existing Azure environments,” he said. “This brings faster time-to-value, simplified procurement, and the ability to scale with confidence on a trusted global platform.”

What SmartAnalytics Delivers

• Performance Dashboard: Offers KPIs like call containment, transfer rates, and interaction durations for quick performance assessments.

• Interaction Explorer: Provides full conversation transcriptions (AI- and human-handled) with advanced search and filtering capabilities.

• Real-Time Insights: Enables custom dashboards for agile, data-driven decision-making.

• Compliance Monitoring: Tracks sentiment, adherence to regulatory frameworks (HIPAA, PCI DSS), and SOP compliance.

• Seamless Integration: Supports Snowflake integration and cross-functional data sharing for broader analytics.

Jake Zborowski, GM of Microsoft Azure Platform, added: “We’re pleased to welcome IntelePeer’s SmartAnalytics solution to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which gives our partners great exposure to cloud customers around the globe.”

For businesses, the availability of SmartAnalytics on Azure means streamlined deployment, built-in scalability, and a more holistic view of customer interactions—all without leaving the Microsoft ecosystem.

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A new report from Sprout Social (NASDAQ: SPT) shows that social media is taking center stage in marketing strategies for 2025, with CMOs reallocating significant portions of their budgets from traditional channels to digital platforms.

The 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, based on insights from 1,200 marketing leaders worldwide, found that 80% plan to divert funds into social, with 87% boosting paid social, and more than 80% expanding influencer and organic social budgets. Talent investment is rising too, with three-quarters of leaders planning to grow their social teams.

ROI Pressure and Data Gaps

Despite rising investment, many leaders lack confidence in their teams’ ability to prove social’s business impact. Only 44% rate their social teams as “expert” at tying activity to outcomes like revenue and efficiency. Instead, most teams still rely on engagement (68%) and conversions (65%) as primary metrics, while executives increasingly expect revenue-driven ROI reporting.

“Social media is rapidly capturing a larger share of marketing budgets, driven by its unmatched ability to deliver results that other channels struggle to achieve,” said Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social. “As social delivers stronger ROI, enhancing data literacy will be critical so brands can harness insights for transformative impact across the organization.”

Social Search and New Talent Priorities

One of the most significant shifts is the rise of social search, fueled by Gen Z behavior. Eighty-one percent of leaders are moving budget away from traditional SEO toward social search optimization (SOSEO), with SOSEO specialists now the top role marketing leaders are hiring for. Over half of brands already have a SOSEO strategy, while 43% are actively experimenting.

Platform Impact and Content Strategies

• Top Platforms: Facebook (70%), YouTube (68%), and TikTok (64%) dominate overall impact. For B2B, LinkedIn leads (70%), while B2C brands still lean on Facebook (67%).

• Content Volume: A disconnect persists between leaders and managers. While 69% of CMOs want more posting, only 50% of managers agree. Data shows engagement actually increased 20% in 2024 despite reduced publishing volumes.

• Cross-Functional Value: Social insights are underutilized outside of marketing. Less than half of teams integrate data into CRM systems, despite leadership demand for customer care, business development, and CX applications.

As Shirley Tat, Global Head of Social at Canva, noted, brands are now embedding social into product and business strategies: “We launched all of our new products this year based on user feedback. We’ve come a long way in thinking about how social media shifts the business forward.”

The report makes clear: in 2025, social media isn’t just a channel—it’s the engine driving customer acquisition, loyalty, and revenue growth.

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MCI USA is giving its Jade AI agent a voice—literally. The company today announced that Jade, its AI-powered event support assistant, now offers voice interaction within OneSystem Plus, MCI USA’s flagship registration and housing management platform.

For event organizers drowning in logistics, exhibitors chasing leads, and attendees just trying to find the right session, the update promises fewer headaches. Jade’s voice functionality lets users simply ask their questions—“What’s my balance due?” or “Can you resend my confirmation?”—and get instant answers in any of 57 languages. More complex issues still escalate to human agents, but for routine inquiries, Jade is now a 24/7 multilingual concierge.

Jeff Moore, MCI USA’s VP of technology and innovation, pitched it this way: “Jade Voice is one more way we’re removing friction from the housing, registration, and lead collection process.” Translation: Fewer jammed call centers, less inbox overload, and faster resolutions for users.

Why It Matters

The event tech market is getting increasingly crowded with AI-driven assistants, from Cvent’s AI tools to Hopin’s integrations. By layering voice on top of chat and email, Jade positions itself as a more complete contact center solution—especially important in a post-pandemic landscape where hybrid and international events demand round-the-clock, multilingual support.

MCI USA isn’t just relying on voice gimmicks. Launched in 2024, Jade already powers predictive analytics, session recommendations, exhibitor matchmaking, AI content creation, and lead tracking throughout the event lifecycle. In short, it’s not just helping registrants check their balance—it’s designed to keep organizers, sponsors, and attendees engaged well past the check-in desk.

If the AI arms race in martech has taught us anything, it’s that speed and scale matter. A human agent can answer one person at a time. Jade can talk to thousands, in 57 languages, at 3 a.m.—and still escalate the tough stuff when needed. For event organizers facing thinner margins and higher attendee expectations, that may be the killer feature.

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