Although there was a slight improvement in the ASX 200’s security rating, it was driven by post-incident security fixes, not proactive strategy

HOBART, Australia, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — UpGuard, a leader in cybersecurity and risk management, released its annual ASX 200 Cybersecurity Report, which measures the cyber risk exposure of Australia’s largest listed companies. Based on daily scanning of billions of data points, UpGuard benchmarked external security posture on a 0–950 scale, finding the average score for the ASX 200 was 728.5 in 2025, equating to a B rating, and showing a 1.58 percent improvement from 2024. However, the report also found that 10 percent of the ASX 200 had active, verified infostealer infections. In addition, the research identified a trend where security scores typically remain stagnant until a major global security issue, such as the CrowdStrike outage, triggers a brief spike in remediation activity. However, these reactive security improvements often subside within months as organizational priorities shift. 

Key Findings from the 2025 Report:

Identity is the primary attack vector: 1 in 10 ASX 200 companies had high confidence that credentials were circulating in infostealer logs, with 71 percent of these infections concentrated in the largest organizations. Supply chain cascade risk: The majority of ASX 200 rely on the same core SaaS platforms, creating a cascade effect where a single vendor vulnerability can exploit hundreds of companies.Encryption is the weakest link for the second year running: Encryption is the lowest-scoring technical category, leaving data privacy at significant risk.Sector leaders and laggards: Information Technology (776) and Utilities (769) lead the index, while the Materials sector (673) continues to rank lowest in overall security posture.Attack surface volatility: In every security category, nearly a third of companies ended up in a worse position than in 2024.

“Even as companies in the ASX 200 continue their efforts to improve security, our research shows that the rise of sophisticated identity threats like infostealers, and new mandates under Australia’s Cyber Security Act 2024 mean that periodic security checks are no longer enough,” said Greg Pollock, director of Research and Insights at UpGuard. “Maintaining robust cybersecurity standards requires a shift to continuous, comprehensive cyber risk posture management that reflects a true end-to-end security posture. Success will be determined by three factors: awareness of change, time to remediation, and security fundamentals.”

Real security posture requires total visibility across an organization’s attack surface, vendors, and threat exposure. To address the challenges in the current threat landscape, ASX 200 organizations need to have a unified system that addresses those three key risk dimensions. Recommendations include:

Implement continuous external scanning to know what is visible on the public Internet.Transition to real-time vendor risk monitoring.Deploy dedicated dark web monitoring and credential exposure detection.

Methodology:
UpGuard’s analysis is derived from UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Posture Management (CRPM) Platform, which provides security ratings based on a quantitative assessment of external cybersecurity posture. This is done using a proprietary, subtractive scoring algorithm that benchmarks performance on a 0–950 scale, with assets starting at a perfect score and deductions applied based on the weighted severity of identified risks and vulnerabilities.

To download the full report, visit here.

UpGuard Summit:
To learn more industry insights and explore the future of cyber risk, UpGuard is holding its quarterly APAC Summit May 21 at 1:00 PM AEST. To register for this online event, visit: https://www.upguard.com/summit

About UpGuard
Founded in 2012, UpGuard is a leader in cybersecurity and risk management. The company’s AI-powered platform for Cyber Risk Posture Management (CRPM) provides a centralized, actionable view of cyber risk across an organization’s vendors, attack surface, and workforce. Trusted by thousands of companies, UpGuard’s platform is designed to help security teams manage cyber risk with confidence and efficiency. UpGuard is headquartered in Hobart, Tasmania with US headquarters in Mountain View, California. To learn more, visit www.upguard.com.

To learn more, visit www.upguard.com.

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SOURCE UpGuard

Use.AI discusses the value of integrating AI, knowledge, and collaboration into a single system.

CLAYMONT, Del., May 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Use.AI recently announced the launch of its unified AI workspace platform, designed to improve daily workflows by centralizing access to multiple leading models in one operating environment.

Powered by several of today’s most prominent AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Llama, Use.AI aims to mitigate the fragmentation and disconnection many individuals and teams experience when using multiple AI tools simultaneously. In doing so, Use.AI directly compresses the time between conceptualization and execution, potentially contributing to lower costs and higher throughput.

Addressing Fragmentation and Friction

Use.AI’s primary value proposition stems from its ability to make multiple leading AI models accessible on one page. This approach is intended to address fragmentation, a result of using multiple AI models across several pages simultaneously.

Use.AI claims that fragmentation inherently results in slower, less productive workflows, since creators and teams using multiple AI models simultaneously must recontextualize their prompts each time they want to test the same idea across models.

Not only does this process of recontextualization add time, but the friction it causes may also disrupt creative thought processes outright. For example, a writer might use multiple AI models to brainstorm or test the same idea across them to receive distinct feedback.

The problem is, if that writer wanted to tweak their prompt to test a new idea, they would have to do so across all of their tabs, and given that chatbots don’t always provide information instantly, the time it takes for multiple bots to process answers at the same time may add up quickly. These delays may be severe enough to distract the writer, interrupting their thought processes to the point of stifling creativity.

Use.AI’s unified platform is designed to mitigate these delays by allowing users to prompt multiple chatbots at once, thereby reducing the time required to compute unique responses and re-enter prompts across multiple tabs.

Supporting Momentum Across Enterprises

Use.AI came about after its creators recognized the growing reliance on AI models in everyday workflows. AI’s continued development lacked structural support; however, Use.AI’s emphasis is on the value of orchestrating existing models.

As many businesses and enterprises scale their AI-assisted operations, Use.AI’s platform supports them by reducing tool overload, streamlining processes, and potentially improving output quality through toolkit consolidation, while giving teams a more organized way to compare outputs and apply AI across recurring tasks.

Use.AI reviews suggest the platform is actively evolving to keep pace with the market, expanding its capabilities to support how teams organize their work. In doing so, Use.AI would mitigate the fragmentation bottleneck, giving users the time and space needed to focus more on conceptualization and less on recontextualization.

About Use.AI Inc

Use.AI Inc. is a unified AI workspace platform that lets users access multiple AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Llama, from a single page. This platform is designed to combat fragmentation by making it easier for users to integrate AI into daily workflows, thereby creating structure and facilitating navigation.

Alex Samuels
PR Manager
Use.AI
pr@use.ai
Claymont, DE 19703, USA

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Devenex launches at Google Cloud Next 2026 as the first governance infrastructure purpose-built to control how AI agents execute across enterprise systems.

LAS VEGAS, May 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Inside the world’s largest organisations, AI agents are no longer experimental. They are executing in production — modifying financial records, triggering payments, approving workflows, and acting with the full operational authority of the enterprises that deployed them. By every credible estimate, the volume and consequence of these actions will increase by an order of magnitude within 24 months.

Yet no infrastructure layer exists to govern what these agents actually do. No systematic policy enforcement before action. No immutable audit trail after. No deterministic control between an agent’s intent and its real-world consequence. The most consequential technology shift in enterprise history is unfolding without an accountability layer.

Today, that changes. Devenex — the Execution Control Plane for AI agents — launches at Google Cloud Next 2026, introducing enterprise-grade governance infrastructure that sits between agent intent and real-world execution. Every action is policy-evaluated, explicitly authorised, identity-bound, and recorded as audit-grade evidence — before it takes effect, giving new life to enterprise AI initiatives.

Devenex is not a monitoring tool. It is not a workflow engine. It is the control plane that ensures no AI-initiated action executes without governance — giving CIOs, CTOs, CROs and enterprise security leaders the confidence to deploy agents at scale without sacrificing accountability.

THE STRUCTURAL GAP

Analyst consensus has converged on a single conclusion: enterprise AI execution capability is outpacing the controls designed to keep it accountable.

Gartner projects that by 2028, a third of enterprise software will incorporate agentic AI — up from less than one percent in 2024. McKinsey identifies governance and risk as the primary barriers to scaling enterprise AI, ahead of model quality or talent. Deloitte’s 2026 enterprise survey finds that 80 percent of leaders piloting AI agents cite security and compliance as the leading obstacle — up from 68 percent a year earlier.

The pattern is consistent across every credible source: enterprises are deploying agents faster than they can govern them. An AI agent that modifies a customer record, approves a discount, or initiates a wire transfer without a governing policy layer is not automation. It is an unmanaged compliance event, a latent security exposure, and a board-level liability.

Devenex addresses this gap at the infrastructure level — not as a feature bolted onto existing tools, but as a purpose-built control plane designed for governed enterprise execution from the ground up.

THE EXECUTION CONTROL PLANE

Devenex operates as the authorisation and governance layer between enterprise decision-making — whether initiated by humans, AI agents, or automated systems — and the execution of actions across enterprise systems of record.

Every action processed through Devenex produces four structured artifacts:

Intent Record. 

Execution Plan. 

Governed Execution. 

Execution Evidence. 

This model ensures that enterprises maintain full traceability from intent to outcome — satisfying EU AI Act, SOC 2, ISO 42001, and sector-specific regulatory requirements.

ENTERPRISE CAPABILITIES

Pre-Execution Policy Enforcement.  Every agent action is evaluated against organizational policy before execution. Nothing executes unchecked. Enterprises gain control over what agents are permitted to do — reducing compliance risk and eliminating ungoverned action.

Dynamic Human-in-the-Loop Governance.  High-consequence actions are routed to designated reviewers without halting low-risk automation. Approval workflows are configurable at the agent, action, or policy level — ensuring human oversight where it matters without creating operational bottlenecks.

Immutable Audit Infrastructure.  Every governed execution is recorded to an append-only ledger. Enterprises gain continuous compliance evidence without manual reporting.

Unified Observability Across Agents.  Live and retrospective visibility into agent activity, policy adherence, and anomaly patterns. Security, compliance, and operations teams share a single authoritative view of enterprise execution.

BUILT FOR ENTERPRISE REALITY

Devenex delivers flexible deployment models—SaaS, hybrid, and self-deployed—enabling organizations to adopt at their own pace.

Engineered to be framework-agnostic and cloud-native, Devenex integrates seamlessly across diverse enterprise environments. The platform does not replace existing systems of record, integration platforms, or identity providers. It governs execution across them.

LEADERSHIP

“For four decades, Abacus has earned the trust of enterprises navigating their most consequential technology transitions. Devenex represents the next chapter — purpose-built infrastructure for a world where AI agents execute with the authority of the organisations that deploy them. Governance at this layer is not optional. It is a precondition for enterprise AI at scale.”

— Aly Kuly Khan
Co-Founder & Chairman, Devenex 

“For four decades, we’ve built the layers enterprises run on — systems of record, integration, workflow automation, API and iPaaS governance. Each wave solved the problem the previous one created. Today, AI agents are executing actions on architecture that was never designed to govern them. This isn’t an AI problem. It’s an architectural gap — and it’s the one our experience has prepared us to solve. Enterprises cannot answer four questions about any agentic action: who authorized it, what policy governed it, why it executed as it did, and whether they can prove it after the fact. In regulated environments, these aren’t edge cases — they’re the baseline. Devenex is the execution control plane that answers all four, by design, at execution time.”

— Shoaib A. Khan
Co-Founder & CEO, Devenex 

AVAILABILITY & ENGAGEMENT

Devenex is available immediately, with deployment support from Abacus teams across the globe.

Enterprise pilot programmes are open to qualified organisations seeking to bring governed execution to production AI workloads.

Learn more at www.Devenex.com 

THE ROAD AHEAD

Enterprise AI is entering its execution era. The question is no longer whether agents can act — it is whether they can act accountably. The organisations that solve this first will scale AI faster, operate with greater confidence, and carry less risk than those that treat governance as a downstream problem.

Devenex exists to make governed execution the default operating model of the enterprise. Not as an aspiration. As infrastructure.

About Devenex

Devenex is the Execution Control Plane for AI agents — enterprise infrastructure that governs every action across systems with policy enforcement, explicit authorisation, and audit-grade evidence. Built for the agentic era, Devenex sits between intent and execution so that no enterprise action moves forward ungoverned. Devenex is built by the team behind Abacus, bringing four decades of enterprise trust to AI execution governance.

About Abacus

Abacus is a global professional services leader in technology, outsourcing, and people solutions. With nearly 40 years of experience, 5,000+ professionals across four continents, and 1,500+ enterprise clients, Abacus designs bespoke solutions that enable organisations to create the future of business and embrace change for sustainable growth.

Media Contact:
Shoaib Khan
shoaib.khan@abacuscambridge.com
+1 (347) 701-4221
www.devenex.com

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