iTWire

Business IT News / AI and Data Garry Valenzisi, Vice President & General Manager at Iron Mountain ANZ | Published 16 July 2026 AI and Data "AI is transforming the way organisations work, helping unlock new levels of productivity, insight and innovation. But while everyone wants the promise of AI, far fewer are confronting the data reality required to deliver it.

Not long ago, AI felt like a competitive advantage. Today, it is rapidly becoming infrastructure. Every generation has a technology that rewrites the rules instead of simply improving the game. Cloud changed where applications lived. Mobile changed where work happened. AI is accelerating the pace of business. Take Anthropic's recent Mythos demonstration. The headline was not that AI could identify software vulnerabilities. Security teams have been managing vulnerabilities for years.

Kumar Mitra, Commercial Leader, Greater Asia Pacific, Lenovo | Published 16 July 2026 AI Appreciation Day usually means celebrating what technology can do. This year, the more useful question for Asia Pacific businesses is different: what is AI actually doing inside their operations, and what still needs fixing before it delivers at scale. Adoption has moved past the pilot stage.

Business IT News / AI and Data John Wood, Head of Systems Engineering, Veeam | Published 16 July 2026 AI and Data "AI Appreciation Day is a good moment to recognise how much AI has already changed the way we work, and the new responsibilities that come with it. Across the customers I work with in ANZ, teams are shipping faster, resolving issues sooner, and freeing people up for work that actually needs human judgement.

Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day celebrates the ways AI has changed life for the better. Gareth Cox, VP of Sales Asia Pacific and Japan, Horizon3.ai The boom in AI innovation and investments means cybersecurity needs to be at the forefront of business leaders' minds. It has introduced new risk surfaces, particularly with adversaries using AI to accelerate their efforts to steal data and IP, or leveraging AI to move quicker to compromise accounts for ransom.

Gareth Cox, Pieter Danhieux, Tanya Bragin, John Cannava, Ryan Rayner, Srinivas Gutta, Dan Winson and Andrew Lai | Published 16 July 2026 Eight Industry Executives' Comments: Gareth Cox, VP of Sales Asia Pacific and Japan, Horizon3.ai The boom in AI innovation and investments means cybersecurity needs to be at the forefront of business leaders' minds.

As PR people you know all this, but just in case here is some helpful information AI Appreciation Day is an informal international awareness day observed each year on 16 July. The day is intended to: Recognise how artificial intelligence is improving areas such as business, healthcare, education and communication. Acknowledge the researchers, developers and users behind AI systems. Encourage discussion about responsible AI, including accuracy, privacy, bias, employment impacts and ethics.

COMPANY NEWS: Konica Minolta has been positioned as a Leader in the Quocirca Cloud Print Services Landscape 2026 for the third consecutive year. According to the international market research firm, “Konica Minolta stands out for its cloud-first, security-led approach, combining cloud print, workflow, fax, device monitoring, and zero trust-aligned controls across a hybrid, multi-cloud architecture.

Telstra’s nationwide outage last week was a timely reminder that connectivity has become one of the most critical components of modern business infrastructure. When the network failed, payment terminals stopped processing transactions, remote monitoring systems lost visibility, connected devices dropped offline, and organisations across the country found themselves unable to operate as normal. For many, that represents a single point of failure.

COMPANY NEWS: Property transaction – exercise of call option to purchase land Macquarie Technology Group Limited (ASX: MAQ) refers to its announcement on 14 July 2025 that a wholly owned subsidiary in its Macquarie Data Centres business had entered into a put and call option to purchase a parcel of land in Sydney. The Company confirms that following the successful completion of the subdivision process the option to purchase the parcel of land was exercised today.