As CRN celebrates AI Innovators Week, we’re taking a closer look at how some award-winning products sold through the channel are using and supporting AI in the market today.
Artificial intelligence has quickly evolved from an emerging technology into a practical tool for addressing real business challenges. Across the technology industry, vendors are embedding AI into products to strengthen security, automate operations, accelerate development, improve data management and help organizations make faster, better-informed decisions.
As CRN celebrates AI Innovators Week, we’re highlighting the winning products from our 2026 Tech Innovators Awards to showcase how they use or support AI. The products featured here—all available through the channel—span categories ranging from AI infrastructure, PCs and software platforms to cloud, networking, storage, data protection, observability and cybersecurity.
Some apply generative or agentic AI to automate complex workflows, troubleshoot problems, improve testing or assist users through natural-language interfaces.
Others tap machine learning to detect anomalies, classify sensitive information, identify threats and optimize performance. Several provide the infrastructure, governance and data-management capabilities organizations need to develop and operate AI securely at scale.
And a small number do not use AI directly but help customers prepare for or defend against its growing impact.
Together, these products illustrate the breadth of AI innovation available to the channel.
Here’s a closer look at how 28 Tech Innovators winners say they are providing the capabilities solution providers need to turn AI’s potential into real-life business outcomes.
Winning Product: Red Hat AI
Tech Innovators Category: AI Infrastructure
AI Capabilities: Many organizations remain stuck in the “pilot phase” due to fragmented tools and inconsistent infrastructure, which create security gaps, unpredictable costs and difficulty scaling. With Red Hat AI Enterprise, IT teams can manage AI as a standardized enterprise system rather than a siloed project, making AI delivery as reliable and repeatable as traditional enterprise software. By unifying model and application lifecycles and integrating high-performance inference, lifecycle governance, agentic capabilities and self-service model access into a single platform that spans any hardware—from NVIDIA to AMD to Intel—enterprises can move from experimentation to scalable, production-grade AI.
Winning Product: HP ZGX Nano G1n
Tech Innovators Category: AI PCs
AI Capabilities: The HP ZGX Nano G1n allows teams to develop, fine-tune and run advanced AI models locally, including LLMs and computer vision applications. It supports models up to 200 billion parameters on a single system, with the option to scale further by linking devices and is optimized for modern generative and agentic AI workloads. By bringing AI closer to where data resides, it enables real-time workflows, reduces latency and improves data security. This is critical for organizations that require fast iteration, controlled environments or operation without reliable network access, including enterprise and regulated use cases.
Winning Product: Dell AI Data Platform with Dell Orchestration Engine
Tech Innovators Category: AI Software and Platforms
AI Capabilities: AI is foundational to the platform. The Data Orchestration Engine applies AI-driven active learning to improve dataset quality through automated labeling, enrichment and transformation of structured and multimodal data. GPU-accelerated processing using NVIDIA cuDF delivers up to 3X faster data preparation, while cuVS vector search enables up to 12X faster indexing for retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI applications. The Marketplace features more than 200 AI models, NVIDIA NIM microservices and AI Blueprints for rapid deployment. An AI assistant supports natural-language SQL query for business users and AI-Q blueprints enable building customizable agents with data governance.
Winning Product: SmartBear BearQ
Tech Innovators Category: Application Development and DevOps
AI Capabilities: BearQ is built as an AI-native system powered by autonomous agents. Its AI capabilities include autonomous exploration of application workflows, intelligent test generation and continuous maintenance, context-aware validation based on intended user behavior, adaptive learning as applications evolve and multi-agent orchestration for parallel testing. These capabilities are critical because traditional QA cannot keep pace with AI-generated code. BearQ ensures that as development accelerates, quality does not fall behind, enabling teams to validate real user outcomes at scale and maintain confidence in application integrity.
Winning Product: Dynatrace Intelligence
Tech Innovators Category: Application Performance/Observability
AI Capabilities: Dynatrace Intelligence uses deterministic AI to pinpoint exact root causes from real-time system data and agentic AI to make decisions and take action within defined guardrails, enabling faster resolution and safe, reliable automation. This gives teams a clear understanding of what is happening and what to do next, reducing guesswork and speeding issue resolution. As a result, teams can address issues more quickly, lower operational effort and keep systems running reliably in complex cloud and AI-driven environments.
Winning Product: Cohesity Gaia
Tech Innovators Category: Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
AI Capabilities: Cohesity Gaia on‑premises provides AI‑powered search, retrieval and summarization across protected backup data using semantic search and retrieval‑augmented generation. It supports multilingual indexing, sensitive data redaction and permission‑aware responses to ensure results align with existing access controls. These capabilities are important because they allow organizations to safely apply AI to historical, unstructured data that has traditionally been inaccessible to analytics, delivering accurate insights without moving data or weakening security and compliance controls.
Tech Innovators Category: Cloud Management and Optimization
AI Capabilities: VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 enables organizations to run AI and traditional workloads on the same private cloud platform, reducing the need for separate AI infrastructure. It supports AI workloads with integrated GPU capabilities, model services and high-performance infrastructure designed to deliver near-bare-metal performance while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance. By applying consistent APIs, policy models and lifecycle automation across all workloads, VCF simplifies AI deployment and scaling. This unified approach reduces operational silos and allows organizations to extend existing infrastructure strategies to support AI without introducing additional complexity.
Winning Product: Qumulo Data Platform
Tech Innovators Category: Data and Information Management
AI Capabilities: Qumulo’s latest updates introduce AI-driven data management and acceleration capabilities that make storage “intelligent.” Features like NeuralCache use machine learning to predict data access patterns and prefetch data automatically, reducing latency for AI workloads. New capabilities such as autonomous AI agents, AI-optimized data delivery and high-speed GPU networking ensure data is delivered efficiently to AI compute environments, improving performance and reducing manual intervention. These innovations are important because they eliminate data bottlenecks, speed up model training, reduce costs and maximize GPU utilization, enabling organizations to run AI workloads faster, more efficiently and at global scale.
Winning Product: Commvault Cloud
Tech Innovators Category: Data Protection, Management and Resiliency
AI Capabilities: Commvault’s latest innovations embed AI across the full cyber resilience lifecycle—helping enterprises recover data cleanly and confidently at scale. Conversational AI introduces a natural-language interface to automate data protection workflows, while Threat Scan Advanced uses AI to identify risks in protected data. Synthetic Recovery leverages AI-enabled threat detection to assemble clean data for recovery. Together with automated Cleanroom Recovery runbooks, these capabilities create an end-to-end, intelligent recovery workflow—enabling faster, more accurate restoration and minimizing business disruption in increasingly complex, AI-driven environments.
Winning Product: Zscaler Cellular
Tech Innovators Category: Edge Computing / Internet of Things
AI Capabilities: Zscaler Cellular provides AI-driven anomaly detection for cellular-connected IoT/OT devices, continuously learning expected device behavior and flagging deviations such as misuse, misconfiguration, unexpected geo-movement/roaming, unusual destinations or abnormal traffic patterns. These insights translate directly into automated Zero Trust actions, e.g., step up controls, restrict regions, quarantine a device or immediately block cellular access when behavior changes. This is important because many IoT/OT assets are unmanaged and operate outside traditional security visibility; AI helps security teams detect threats faster, reduce false positives and enforce real-time policy at scale across large, distributed device fleets.
Winning Product: NetBrain Next-Gen R12
Tech Innovators Category: IT Infrastructure Monitoring and Management
AI Capabilities: NetBrain Next-Gen R12 includes multiple AI capabilities—Deep Diagnosis (Agentic AI) + GenAI: Interprets goals, reasons iteratively using real-time network data and executes workflows within guardrails; AI Bot: Enables natural language troubleshooting and safer change management; Triggered Deep Diagnosis: Responds to ITSM tickets or API calls, running diagnostics automatically; AI Runbook Companion: Instantly transforms the diagnosis or change process into a step-by-step, guided automation template; AI-Insight & AI-Document: Provide summarized insights and documentation from large data sets; AI Parser: Generate parser rules in seconds without mastering complex grammar or regex; and Defensible, Governed AI: Ensures human oversight and data privacy.
Winning Product: Cavelo Flash
AI Capabilities: Vulnerability Management: Identify and prioritize weaknesses before attackers can exploit them; Data Discovery and Classification: Automatically locate and categorize sensitive data in high-risk for complete visibility and control; Configuration Management: Detect and correct misconfigurations to strengthen compliance and reduce the overall attack surface.
Winning Product: Zayo DynamicLink
Tech Innovators Category: Networking—Enterprise
AI Capabilities: DynamicLink embeds AI directly into network operations through DashAI, a conversational AI assistant that enables enterprises to provision, scale, and manage connectivity using natural language. By reducing reliance on manual workflows and complex interfaces, DashAI simplifies network operations and accelerates execution. It leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ground responses in Zayo’s DynamicLink knowledge base, improving accuracy and minimizing hallucinations. DashAI also confirms user intent before executing actions, ensuring changes are deliberate and aligned with enterprise requirements. As a result, enterprises can manage increasingly complex networks more quickly and precisely, without requiring deep technical expertise.
Winning Product: Eaton 9PX G2 Uninterruptible Power Supply
Tech Innovators Category: Power Protection and Management
AI Capabilities: While the Eaton 9PX G2 does not directly use artificial intelligence, its advanced monitoring, predictive battery analytics, and remote management capabilities provide the foundation for AI driven insights. Enhanced battery health data and real time performance metrics support proactive decision making and future integration with intelligent analytics platforms. These capabilities help customers and partners anticipate issues, optimize performance, and reduce downtime across distributed IT environments.
Winning Product: 1Password Unified Access
Tech Innovators Category: Identity and Access Management
AI Capabilities: Unified Access enables organizations to securely deploy and scale AI agents by bringing visibility and control to how they access systems and data. It can detect agent-driven activity, secure the credentials and secrets those agents rely on and enforce policy at the moment access occurs. By extending identity security to AI agents and machine workloads, Unified Access ensures access is context-aware, governed and fully auditable. This allows organizations to move AI initiatives into production with confidence, reducing the risk of credential exposure, overprivileged access and unmanaged automation as AI becomes embedded in everyday workflows.
Winning Product: Abnormal AI Phishing Coach
Tech Innovators Category: Email and Web Security
AI Capabilities: AI Phishing Coach uses AI to turn real blocked attacks into personalized phishing simulations, deliver just-in-time coaching when users engage, generate custom training videos/modules, and automate the training lifecycle with evolving risk scoring. These capabilities matter because they replace generic, manual awareness programs with training based on the actual threats employees face, delivered at the moment it matters most, while reducing admin effort and improving measurable behavior change and human risk visibility.
Winning Product: Arctic Wolf Aurora Endpoint Security
Tech Innovators Category: Endpoint Protection/Extended Detection and Response
AI Capabilities: Aurora Endpoint Security is powered by Aurora AI within the Aurora Superintelligence Platform, combining machine learning, agentic AI and human-validated intelligence to deliver advanced endpoint protection. These capabilities enable continuous analysis of trillions of weekly security events to detect, prevent, and respond to threats in real time. AI-driven prevention blocks known and unknown threats, including zero-day attacks, before execution, while automated investigation and correlation reduce alert fatigue and accelerate response. Integrated with Arctic Wolf’s agentic SOC, Aurora AI ensures detections are continuously refined and validated by security experts, delivering faster, more accurate, and more consistent endpoint security outcomes at scale.
Winning Product: CrowdStrike Falcon Data Security
Tech Innovators Category: Data Security
AI Capabilities: Falcon Data Security delivers AI-powered classification to identify and classify sensitive data as it is created, accessed and moved across endpoints, browsers, SaaS applications, cloud services and AI-driven workflows. It also protects GenAI use by preventing sensitive data exposure and blocking data leakage across AI tools. These capabilities are critical as organizations adopt AI and data move faster across environments. By applying AI in real time, Falcon Data Security enables organizations to protect sensitive data at the moment it is accessed and shared, helping stop data theft before it becomes a breach.
Winning Product: CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM
Tech Innovators Category: Security Operations Platform/SIEM Platforms
AI Capabilities: Falcon Next-Gen SIEM introduces new AI capabilities through Falcon Onum, bringing CrowdStrike’s AI-powered detections directly to third-party data sources through in-pipeline analysis. This eliminates detection delays while removing friction and cost from migrating data into Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. Driving agentic SOC transformation, AI agents in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM—including Search Analysis, Correlation Rule Generation, Data Transformation, Workflow Generation, and Query Translation—automate the most time-intensive SIEM workflows to eliminate manual effort and accelerate outcomes.
Winning Product: Cyera AI Security Platform
Tech Innovators Category: AI Security
AI Capabilities: Cyera’s updates secure the agentic AI era by unifying data, identity and AI intent. Key launches include AI Guardian for real-time model guardrails, Data Lineage for autonomous audit trails, and Browser Shield to prevent leaks into public AI models. These are integrated via Cyera MCP, which uses natural language to simplify complex risk management. By leveraging AI to autonomously spot shadow AI usage and map how agents transform data, Cyera replaces siloed legacy signals with a context-aware security layer. This allows enterprises to scale innovation safely, ensuring AI adoption remains compliant and reliable.
Winning Product: Cynet CyAI
Tech Innovators Category: Managed Detection and Response
AI Capabilities: DynamicLink embeds AI directly into network operations through DashAI, a conversational AI assistant that enables enterprises to provision, scale and manage connectivity using natural language. By reducing reliance on manual workflows and complex interfaces, DashAI simplifies network operations and accelerates execution. It leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ground responses in Zayo’s DynamicLink knowledge base, improving accuracy and minimizing hallucinations. DashAI also confirms user intent before executing actions, ensuring changes are deliberate and aligned with enterprise requirements. As a result, enterprises can manage increasingly complex networks more quickly and precisely, without requiring deep technical expertise.
Winning Product: ESET Threat Intelligence
Tech Innovators Category: Threat and Exposure Management
AI Capabilities: ESET Threat Intelligence comes with ESET AI Advisor, a GenAI chatbot that automates threat analysis, IoC generation, and YARA rule creation, significantly reducing response times for security teams. Unlike other vendor offerings, AI Advisor leverages ESET’s 20-plus years of AI and machine learning expertise to provide SOC-level insights in an interactive, easy-to-use format. This is a gamechanger for companies with limited IT resources who need to defend against advanced adversaries and AI-driven attacks. ESET AI Advisor helps level the playing field, ensuring security teams have the intelligence and automation needed to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Winning Product: Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud 2.0
Tech Innovators Category: Cloud and Application Security
AI Capabilities: Cortex Cloud 2.0 introduces an autonomous AI workforce powered by Cortex AgentiX, trained on over 1.2 billion real-world threat responses. Unlike traditional automation that requires manual triggers, these intelligent agents autonomously investigate alerts, map the blast radius and execute remediation steps in minutes. This is critical because AI-driven threats now move at machine speed, far outpacing human-led SOC operations. By shifting from “detect and notify” to “detect and resolve,” these capabilities eliminate alert fatigue, shrink the window of exposure, and allow security teams to focus on high-level strategy rather than manual triage.
Winning Product: ThreatLocker Zero Trust Network Access
Tech Innovators Category: Network Security—SMB
AI Capabilities: The product does not rely on AI but is designed to combat the growing volume and effectiveness of cyberattacks powered by it. As AI accelerates zero-day attacks, highly targeted phishing campaigns, and exploit discovery, Zero Trust solutions that deny by default are more important than ever.
Winning Product: Zscaler Internet Access
Tech Innovators Category: Network Security— Enterprise
AI Capabilities: Zscaler AI data advantage: AI without incredible data is useless, and Zscaler’s 500 billion daily transactions give us a unique AI advantage with more data for more advanced AI training yielding more accurate, effective security and IT outcomes. An ideal AI proxy: Our inline proxy architecture natively offers seamless visibility and control of customer AI activities, inspecting both prompts and responses while protecting data across all potential AI channels, including SaaS, endpoints, and cloud.
Winning Product: Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange
Tech Innovators Category: Secure Access Service Edge
AI Capabilities: Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange processes over 500 billion daily transactions. AI/ML models continuously analyze communication patterns to detect and block threats dynamically without user intervention. It also uses AI to analyze and classify unstructured data and implement effective data governance policies. Our AI-powered policy engine offers automatic policy recommendations to help speed up compliance initiatives.
Winning Product: VDURA Data Platform V12
Tech Innovators Category: Storage—Enterprise
AI Capabilities: VDURA Data Platform V12 is purpose-built for every stage of the AI pipeline. RDMA support enables direct GPU-to-storage data transfers, bypassing CPU bottlenecks for low-latency, high-throughput data paths critical to model training and inference. Context-Aware Tiering includes a KVCache Writeback feature for inference SLA compliance and a Context Cache Tiering Framework supporting long-context LLM serving and RAG workloads. The Elastic Metadata Engine handles the billions of concurrent file operations that AI training generates. V12 delivers the sustained throughput NVIDIA and AMD GPU clusters demand: 0.5—4 GB/s per GPU, scaling linearly across thousands of nodes.
Winning Product: Luware Nimbus Virtual User
Tech Innovators Category: Unified Communications & Collaboration— Enterprise
AI Capabilities: Virtual User leverages AI to revolutionize how contact centers handle customer interactions. Virtual User isn’t about replacing human agents; it’s about empowering them by automating high-volume, repetitive tasks that fall outside the agent’s control. Integrating Microsoft’s Copilot, Luware’s Virtual Users streamline interactions before human agents even join. Capabilities include—Intent understanding: Interprets customer queries to route them to the right department; Agent reconnection: Reconnects returning customers with the same agent for continuity; Security verification: Manages standard security checks efficiently; Sentiment analysis: Matches customer emotional tone with the best-suited agent; and Language detection: Identifies customer’s spoken language.
