Reflecting on 2025: The Year AI Became “Ambient”
Stuart Glover
As we close the year, AI is no longer a tool we “use”—it is ambient. It is in our cars, our glasses, and our office software, working quietly in the…
2025
Closing Out 2025: Infrastructure Spoofing and Year-End Breaches
2025 ended with a glimpse into the future of cyber-physical warfare, including GPS spoofing and attacks on national infrastructure. Key Events: Indian Airport GPS Spoofing: Over 800 flights delayed by…
Global AI Standards: The December 2025 Summit
The year ended with a global consensus on AI safety. 2025 proved that while AI is unstoppable, it must be guided by human-centric principles.
The New Creative Class: AI-Human Collaboration
Mid-December saw a cultural shift: the “AI-Human” tag became a mark of quality. The most popular music and art were no longer pure AI or pure human, but a seamless…
Carbon-Aware AI: Sustainable Computing Breakthroughs
In early December, major data centers switched to carbon-aware scheduling—training heavy AI models only when renewable energy production is at its peak in the local area.
Holiday Heists: November’s Financial Cybersecurity Report
As the holiday shopping season began, threat actors pivoted to retail and high-finance institutions. Key Events: Under Armour Ransomware: Theft-first attack exposed millions of customer records. Wall Street Breach: A…
AI in Agriculture: Precision Farming with Drones
As the harvest season wound down, AI-controlled drone swarms proved their worth by treating individual diseased plants rather than spraying entire fields, reducing pesticide use by 40%.
Generative Gaming: Playable Worlds in Real-Time
November changed entertainment forever. New gaming engines now use generative AI to build unique maps and dialogue on the fly, meaning no two players ever experience the exact same story.
Local Governments in the Crosshairs: October’s Service Disruptions
October saw a wave of attacks on municipal systems. From property tax payments to court operations, local residents felt the direct impact. Key Events: US Municipal Hits: Counties in Texas…
AI and Cybersecurity: The Battle of the Bots
Cyber Defense AI reached a milestone in October, where “Autonomous SOC” (Security Operations Center) agents began neutralizing 0-day exploits before human engineers even logged in for the day.
The Personalized Medicine Revolution
October saw the first AI-designed treatment protocols tailored to a patient’s specific genetic makeup, moving us closer to the end of “one-size-fits-all” healthcare.
Beyond Data: The Physical Cost of Cyberattacks
September showed that cyberattacks can stop assembly lines. Major manufacturers faced outages that led to record revenue losses. Key Events: Jaguar Land Rover: Reported a 24% revenue drop due to…
AI and the Future of Legal Discovery
Law firms reported a 70% reduction in research time as reasoning models began handling “E-Discovery,” parsing through millions of documents to find the “smoking gun” in complex litigation.
Autonomous Financial Planning: AI Wealth Managers
September marked the release of AI financial agents that don’t just give advice—they execute trades, rebalance portfolios, and manage tax-loss harvesting automatically based on a user’s life goals.
SaaS Under Siege: How One Breach Hit Many in August
August highlighted the danger of SaaS integrations. A breach at a sales-enablement tool allowed attackers to pivot into major corporate CRM environments. Key Events: OAuth Token Theft: Hackers bypassed passwords…
The Rise of AI Co-Designers in Architecture
Architects began using generative AI to create “living” building designs that optimize for airflow, natural light, and carbon footprint based on specific local weather data.
Multimodal 2.0: AI That Sees the Physical World
In August, vision-language models evolved to understand 3D space. AI can now analyze a live video feed of a construction site and identify safety violations or structural misalignments instantly.
The “ToolShell” Vulnerability: A July Patching Nightmare
July was dominated by the discovery of “ToolShell,” a chain of critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint exploited by nation-state actors. Key Events: Global Patching Race: Healthcare sectors hit hardest by…
AI in Energy: Optimizing the Smart Grid
As summer heatwaves peaked, AI-driven grid management prevented blackouts by predicting demand spikes with 99% accuracy and redistributing renewable energy in real-time.
Real-Time Translation: The End of Language Barriers
July saw the debut of sub-50ms latency in AI voice translation. Two people speaking different languages can now hold a natural, fluid conversation via earbuds, with the AI maintaining the…
High Altitude Hacks: Ransomware Targets the Skies
In June, the FBI issued a warning as “Scattered Spider” targeted global airlines, disrupting flight scheduling and loyalty programs. Key Events: Qantas & WestJet: Millions of passenger records exfiltrated. Credential…
The Rise of Personalized AI Tutors
June’s education report: AI tutors now adapt to a student’s emotional state, slowing down when a child looks confused and offering rewards when they excel.
Synthetic Data: When AI Trains on Itself
The “Data Wall” was hit in June. With the internet’s high-quality data exhausted, researchers began using high-fidelity synthetic data to train the next generation of models.
The Enemy Within: May’s Wave of Insider Exploits
May focused on “social engineering 2.0,” where threat actors didn’t just hack systems—they bribed people. Key Events: Coinbase Agent Bribery: Attackers bribed overseas support staff for account access. Marks &…
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 2.0
AI met physical labor in late May. Multimodal models were integrated into warehouse robots, allowing them to understand “pick up the blue box and put it near the door” without…
The Search Engine War: AI Overviews vs. Traditional Links
Google and Perplexity redefined search in May. Users no longer click links; they receive synthesized answers. This sparked a major debate over “fair use” and the survival of independent journalism.
Signal Lost: The April Telecom Security Crisis
The telecommunications sector took a heavy hit in April. SK Telecom confirmed a breach affecting 23 million users, raising the specter of massive SIM-swapping campaigns. Key Events: SK Telecom SIM…
AI Legislation: The EU AI Act Takes Flight
Governance caught up in April. The first major fines under the EU AI Act were issued, targeting companies using “high-risk” AI without transparent bias testing.
Wearable AI: The Death of the Smartphone Screen?
April saw the launch of second-generation AI glasses. No screens—just a voice in your ear that translates languages in real-time and identifies the people standing in front of you.
The Weakest Link: Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Explored
March reminded us that you are only as secure as your least secure vendor. A massive breach at a defense contractor exposed 4.2TB of sensitive data. Key Events: National Defense…
The Sovereignty of Data: Why Companies are Building Private AI
By late March, enterprises stopped sending data to the public cloud. The trend shifted toward “Local RAG” (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), where AI learns from a company’s internal PDFs without that data…
Video Generation Goes Mainstream: The Sora Effect
Hollywood met its match in March. High-fidelity video generation became accessible to the public, allowing users to create 60-second cinematic clips from a single sentence.
Critical Care: The February Ransomware Surge in Healthcare
February saw a focused series of attacks on the healthcare sector. Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) groups like Qilin targeted regional hospital networks, leading to significant service disruptions. Key Events: HSHS & Ascension…
AI in Biology: The Protein Folding Breakthroughs of 2025
AI isn’t just for writing emails. In late February, DeepMind 3.0 predicted the structures of nearly all known proteins, accelerating drug discovery timelines from years to weeks.
Reasoning Models: When AI Started to “Think” Before It Spoke
The “Chain of Thought” breakthrough became standard in February. New models now allocate “thinking time” to solve complex math and coding problems, drastically reducing hallucinations by verifying logic internally before…
New Year, New Threats: How AI Defined January’s Cyber Landscape
As 2025 kicked off, the cybersecurity world saw a massive shift in social engineering. Threat actors began utilizing advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to create phishing campaigns that were virtually…
Small Language Models (SLMs): The Edge Computing Revolution
Why use a trillion-parameter model to summarize a grocery list? Mid-January saw the rise of SLMs (Small Language Models) that run locally on smartphones and laptops, prioritizing privacy and speed…
Agentic AI: The Shift from Chatbots to Autonomous Workers
January marked the death of the simple prompt. The focus shifted to AI Agents—systems that don’t just talk, but execute multi-step workflows across different software tools without human hand-holding. Major…