On this AI Appreciation Day, we spotlight four foundational pillars that are shaping the future of AI: ethics, sustainability, infrastructure, and security. To discuss these issues, we sat down with global leaders from various organizations.
Today is AI Appreciation Day — a novel initiative that celebrates the role of artificial intelligence (and, augmented intelligence) across multiple domains and spheres of life. AI has rapidly transitioned from a niche area of computer science to the beating heart of global innovation. From transforming healthcare diagnostics to automating complex supply chains, AI’s fingerprints are everywhere. But today—AI Appreciation Day—is not just about celebrating the achievements of artificial intelligence. It’s also about reflecting on how we are building and deploying these systems: responsibly, sustainably, and securely.
Let’s explore four critical segments driving thoughtful AI innovation in 2025 and beyond. And to explain these, we sat down with a panel of global leaders:
Panel of speakers includes:
Tammy Soares, President of Launch by NTT DATA
Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer, Hitachi Vantara
Munu Gandhi, President of IT Solutions at Xerox
Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat
Erik Gronvall, VP Strategy & Technology, Data Center, CommScope
Sapna Capoor, Director of Global Communications at Infinidat
Pierre Mouallem, CISO at Delinea
Mark Wojtasiak, Vice President of Research and Strategy, Vectra AI
Responsible AI: The Compass of Innovation
As AI becomes deeply embedded into daily life, the ethics behind its design and use have never been more important. From biased facial recognition algorithms to opaque credit scoring models, the past has shown that AI can unintentionally reinforce systemic inequalities—unless we act intentionally.
Tammy Soares, President of Launch by NTT DATA, said, “On this AI Appreciation Day, it’s notable how rapidly the technology is evolving and embedding into core operations. GenAI and especially agentic AI are becoming foundational for how organizations operate, compete, and grow. At the same time, bad actors are also using this AI to evolve how they attack legitimate organizations.”
Tammy added, “We’re partnering to deliver AI-powered solutions that anticipate threats and shift security from reactive to proactive strategies. It’s exciting to see the future come to life, and it’s critically important that leaders are intentional and mindful of the challenges and risks in addition to the incredible opportunities ahead.”
Key developments in recent years have pushed the bar higher for AI research and market penetration. We are witnessing new use cases every day.
For example:
- Algorithmic Transparency Laws in the EU and US are pushing companies to disclose the rationale behind AI decisions, especially in hiring, healthcare, and financial services.
- AI Ethics Boards are now mandatory in many enterprise R&D teams, tasked with ensuring models reflect values like fairness, inclusivity, and explainability.
- Generative AI Guardrails are being baked into tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to detect hallucinations, enforce factual grounding, and prevent misuse.
Sapna Capoor, Director of Global Communications at Infinidat, said, “GenAI is a fascinating technological advancement, but it’s only useful for enterprises when it delivers accurate and relevant answers to queries. As we celebrate World AI Appreciation Day 2025, we must recognize that having the right tools to enable the right level of accuracy with enterprise AI is crucial. This is why adopting an enterprise storage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture is one of the most important choices an enterprise will make this year for delivering business value, technical integrity, and reliable outcomes for AI workloads and applications.”
Sapna signed off by saying —“AI RAG will help build trust in AI in 2025 and beyond. It starts with enterprise storage, which stores an enterprise’s data for improving AI’s accuracy without the need to re-train it.”
Insight:
Responsible AI is no longer a “nice to have”—it’s becoming the foundation of trust. Businesses that prioritize ethical frameworks early are now seeing stronger user retention, fewer compliance risks, and better public perception.
Mark Wojtasiak, Vice President of Research and Strategy, Vectra AI, highlighted the role of AI in cybersecurity. He said, “AI is completely changing the game in cybersecurity—and not a moment too soon. The threat landscape has shifted from isolated incidents to modern, persistent, fast-moving hybrid attacks that move across data centers, identities, and clouds, and applications. The old ‘perimeter’ defense mindset doesn’t cut it anymore – without AI, it’s impossible to keep pace. Only AI connects the dots across these domains in real-time to surface real attack signals, and drive faster, smarter responses.”
He continued, “AI adds fuel to both sides of the fire. Attackers are already using it to gain a competitive advantage scaling social engineering and automating full scale campaigns. But we see huge upside for SOC defenders to turn the tables, harnessing AI across their workflow to accelerate threat detection, triage, correlation, prioritization, investigation, response, and reporting. From natural language interfaces and SOC copilots to autonomous AI Agents, we see AI and human intelligence working in concert. The future of cybersecurity is intelligent collaboration between humans and machines.”
AI Sustainability: Greener Models, Smarter Planet
AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), are incredibly resource-intensive. Training GPT-4 reportedly consumed the equivalent energy of hundreds of households for months. As demand for AI scales, so too does its environmental footprint.
Hitachi Vantara’s Chief Product Officer, Octavian Tanase, highlighted the initiatives at his organization. Octavian said, “At a national level, data centers are critical to supporting America’s economic growth by powering businesses and enabling continued leadership in innovation, including for AI applications. Grid operations need to be smart, and that’s where AI can play a huge role. Achieving complete carbon neutrality in AI may be challenging, but significant progress can be made through environmental strategies and energy-grid optimization. These are the ambitious environmental targets that businesses will need to achieve. Hitachi Vantara is currently leading by example, leveraging proprietary AI algorithms within our tech solution stack to automate processes, enhance predictive analytics and optimize data center energy use, achieving carbon emission reductions of up to 96%.”
Leading Practices:
- Model Distillation & Optimization: Reducing model size without sacrificing performance. Open-source projects like TinyML and LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) make smaller, energy-efficient models widely usable.
- Carbon-Aware Scheduling: Data centers now schedule AI training during periods of low carbon intensity (e.g., when renewables peak).
- Regenerative AI Funding Models: Some firms like Hugging Face are reinvesting AI profits into carbon offset projects and clean compute R&D.
Munu Gandhi, President of IT Solutions at Xerox, said, “This AI Appreciation Day is an opportunity to recognize how far the technology has come and how quickly it is evolving from a behind-the-scenes tool into a true digital co-worker. At Xerox, we are focused on deploying agentic AI to handle high-volume, document-based tasks like contract reviews, IT support tickets, and finance workflows. These agents do more than wait for instructions; they anticipate needs, surface insights, and take action, helping us accelerate cycle times, improve visibility, and scale our services business.”
Munu added, “One of the most powerful advantages is their ability to bridge the gap between structured and unstructured data, aggregating information across formats to drive smarter decisions and boost productivity. However, unlocking AI’s full potential means training our human colleagues just as much as the models themselves. Teaching people how to collaborate with AI is as critical as deploying it, and that is how we will truly reinvent how work gets done.”
Insight:
Sustainability is becoming a strategic differentiator in the AI arms race. The next billion-dollar opportunity isn’t just in building the most powerful model—but the most efficient one.
Data Centers & Energy Management: The AI Infrastructure Backbone
Behind every intelligent system lies a sprawling network of data centers, quietly processing exabytes of data. In 2024 alone, the global demand for AI-related compute infrastructure grew by over 35%, pushing energy and cooling systems to their limits.
Erik Gronvall, VP Strategy & Technology, Data Center, CommScope, said, “AI Appreciation Day is a reminder that as AI continues to make inroads into general use, data centers will be called upon to supply the massive compute required to turn promise into practical business benefits. Like AI, data centers will innovate and adapt to meet changing needs and deliver the optimal solutions that this fast-growing industry needs. From what we’re seeing firsthand, it’s not only the technology of AI that’s evolving, but also the delivery model.”
Erik added, “AI-as-a-Service is paving a smooth road for enterprise adoption of AI capabilities, particularly generative AI that can fill multiple roles from customer service to long-term financial planning. This is driving a need for more AI capacity to be deployed faster. CommScope is committed to helping increase the availability of this great technology. There is no end in sight to the ongoing shortage of top-skilled IT expertise, but AI itself is already demonstrating ways that it can help operators fill those gaps with GenAI-powered monitoring and management.”
Innovations Worth Noting:
- Liquid Cooling Systems are replacing traditional HVAC in hyperscale data centers, increasing efficiency by 30–50%.
- Edge AI Processing reduces latency and data movement by handling tasks closer to where the data is generated (e.g., smart factories, hospitals, self-driving cars).
- AI for AI Operations (AIOps): Data centers are now using AI to optimize power usage, detect anomalies, and predict maintenance needs autonomously.
Top AI Insights and News: Peter Piper Pizza Enhances Guest Experience with Conversational Voice AI from SoundHound
Insight:
AI’s growth depends on invisible infrastructure. Sustainable, adaptive data center design is no longer an IT conversation—it’s a climate and geopolitical issue, influencing everything from energy grids to international policy.
AI Training & Security: Fortifying the Future with agentic AI
Pierre Mouallem, CISO at Delinea said, “AI Appreciation Day is a reminder of how far we’ve come and how fast we’re evolving. AI is revolutionizing industries by driving innovation, enhancing efficiency, and reducing costs in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. The emergence of Agentic AI – AI systems that make independent decisions – has resulted in an explosion of machine identities across the enterprise. Our recent research found that for every human identity, there are now 46 machine identities. That’s a staggering expansion of the attack surface in a very short time. This scale brings a new wave of security challenges.”
Pierre added, “AI agents can autonomously manage credentials, interact with systems, and execute tasks, which pose a significant risk to the business if these identities are not properly secured. We’re seeing more attacks targeting these machine identities to bypass security controls, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data. The risks are real, resulting in financial loss, diminished consumer trust, and even regulatory penalties. That’s why treating machine identities with the same care as human identities is crucial. Enforcing least privilege, rotating credentials, and governing strict access controls are essential to staying ahead of evolving threats. AI holds incredible promise. With the right guardrails in place, organization can unlock its full potential while keep their data, systems, and users safe.”
The AI we appreciate today is only as good as the training and security systems behind it. As models grow more powerful, so too do the risks of misuse, theft, or corruption of data and outputs.
What’s Changing:
- Synthetic Data Pipelines are replacing sensitive real-world data, ensuring privacy and reducing dependency on scarce datasets.
- Red Teaming for AI is becoming common. Like ethical hacking for cybersecurity, red teams stress-test models for vulnerabilities like jailbreak prompts, adversarial attacks, or misinformation risks.
- Zero-Trust Architectures in AI environments ensure that every layer of the training and deployment pipeline is protected, monitored, and auditable.
Insight:
Security is no longer just about protecting AI from threats—it’s also about protecting the world from AI threats. Responsible training, access controls, and secure deployment protocols are the pillars of future-proof AI.
Final Reflection: Appreciating AI Means Appreciating Its Builders
AI Appreciation Day goes beyond being awed by what technology can achieve.
It’s about honoring the researchers, data scientists, ethicists, infrastructure engineers, and policy thinkers shaping AI’s future with care and courage.
To truly appreciate AI, we must:
- Build responsibly
- Optimize sustainably
- Invest in resilient infrastructure
- Secure every stage of the pipeline
In this era of exponential possibility, appreciation without accountability is hollow. Let’s not only celebrate what AI is, but ensure it becomes what it should be.
AI Authority Trend: AITech Top Voice: Interview with Sensori.Ai CEO Dr. A.K. Pradeep
To share your insights, please write to us at sales@intentamplify.com
Read More:
ABBYY Launches Purpose-Built AI Solutions to Tackle Demand for Process Optimization
ISG Report: AI-Ready Hybrid Clouds Drive U.S. Firms to Service Providers
What It Really Takes to Run an AI Factory and Why Observability Is the Key
