This piece explores some of the key insights shared at the event, and why Omdia feels Tanium is well positioned to make an impact on the $245bn hybrid workplace technology market.
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Summary
Tanium recently held the London leg of its Converge event series, where the vendor outlined its evolving strategy for endpoint management amid rising risks and AI growth. This piece explores some of the key insights shared at the event and why Omdia feels Tanium is well positioned to make an impact on the $245bn hybrid workplace technology market.
From seeing to sensing
In the realm of endpoint management, improving visibility was the de facto priority two years ago. If infrastructure teams had a clear view of devices in the business, they were well positioned to optimize operations and improve user experiences. But things have changed. At the London leg of its Converge event series, Tanium—a cybersecurity and IT operations (ITOps) vendor—made one thing clear: visibility is now just the baseline in the evolving world of digital infrastructure management and security. Today’s real challenge is in making sense of the mass data businesses now have on endpoint and security environments. Tanium’s vice president of AI, Harman Kaur, summed things up well at the event: customer conversations two years ago were focused around getting access to endpoint and infrastructure data, whereas now the sentiment has changed. Businesses feel they have too much data and need help in figuring out what matters and how it can be used for maximum benefit. This shift in priority is important since, in hybrid, risk-heavy environments, data alone is not power—context is. Enterprises need platforms that help them cut through the noise and surface impactful insights, provide real-time prioritization to empower proactive IT and security, and guide them in taking smart and timely action. Tanium is leaning into this shift, repositioning its platform from a passive data engine to an active decision-making solution. Evidently, the vendor is invested in changing the rules of endpoint management—making it more autonomous and intelligent through capabilities like the following:
- Tanium Ask, which enables natural language querying of endpoint data.
- Adaptive Actions, which automate real-time responses based on changing conditions.
- Confidence Score, which helps prioritize actions by assessing the reliability and relevance of data insights.
“Invisible IT” has become the Holy Grail for Ops teams
Very few IT admins dream of patching endpoints. ITOps is evolving as businesses look to new technologies like AI and automation to bring about a future where the fundamentals take care of themselves. Tanium understands this and is keen to enable it. The vendor has enhanced its platform with new capabilities, including ring-based deployments that allow organizations to roll out changes in phases across endpoint groups using real-time telemetry and automated progression logic. It also introduced Actions Oversight, which ensures visibility and governance over these automated workflows, helping teams confirm they are safe, effective, and aligned with policy. Tanium sits in a sweet spot where it is equally trusted and used by both security and ITOps teams. This balance is important because, in many enterprises, these teams still operate in silos. Tanium delivers a common platform, a shared language, and an accepted source of truth through which this functional and process fragmentation can be eradicated.
Focus less on hype and more on ROI when it comes to automation and AI
When it comes to AI and automation, the hype train is slowing as businesses focus more on how the capabilities can transform ITOps and their bottom lines. Tanium’s automation and AI story is strong. For example, its automation engine has been live in customer environments for almost a year, and positive customer stories are beginning to surface. One customer advised how dedicated staff would previously need to undertake patching through the night once every month—but now these tasks can be automated, improving operational efficiencies and reducing business expenditures. This is not a hypothetical benefit, but quantifiable value through time savings, reduced costs, and better user experiences. Beyond just patching, the same engine can be used to automate investigation workflows, enforce policies, and close security gaps without human intervention.
Choose augmentation over artificial imitation
As AI continues to dominate headlines, it is important that technology vendors adopt more grounded and useful approaches to how they develop and roll out their AI capabilities and messaging. For Tanium, much of this focus is on developing its agentic AI capabilities by providing contextual assistants that support IT and security workflows without trying to replace human judgment. Tanium described two big and common ITOps time-wasters: hunting for the right data and knowing how to use it to deliver the most impact and value. AI agents can help with both. Tanium’s AI capabilities in these areas include planning actions, preparing data, and offering suggestions on how it can be used for maximum benefit. Humans are still very much in control, but AI agents help augment their work. In terms of AI maturity, Tanium is seeing adoption rates vary. Some industries—finance, for instance—are moving faster than others. However, the appetite from businesses is strong across the board, with most looking to vendors like Tanium to help them get started on the journey. Tanium’s approach builds AI agents that respect and enhance humans’ expertise and do not replace them with clunky predictions or generic answers.
Another hot topic in the realm of enterprise AI centers on cost and licensing. Tanium has taken a smart route with its AI commercial model, but by its own admission, it is one that the vendor will need to keep revisiting. Instead of pushing AI as an expensive add-on, capabilities are included in the platform up to a generous usage threshold. If businesses go beyond this threshold, they incur costs based on actual consumption, not vague entitlements. Omdia sees this approach becoming increasingly common among vendors. It helps remove the fear factor of AI use while also supporting AI democratization. Teams can experiment with AI without worrying about hidden costs. When its value becomes obvious and impactful, scaling feels natural and financially justified. The current business reality is that AI adoption remains uneven, but this commercial model supports exploration, encouraging enterprises to take the first steps.
The market is moving toward dynamic reporting experiences
Reporting is another critical ITOps element, and it is evolving in some exciting ways with the help of AI. The days of IT admins having to navigate through numerous stale dashboards are coming to an end. Tanium shared that it is now moving toward AI-enhanced, conversational reporting interfaces that build and deliver context-rich insights on the fly. In a conversation at the event, Harman Kaur summarized it nicely: “There’s something way more satisfying about a report that’s created in front of you,” she noted. “You’re not just reviewing data—you’re interacting with it.” Tanium’s approach to integrations applies similar thinking. The vendor recently launched an “integrations gallery” that makes it easier for customers to build rich integrations between Tanium and other solutions. But the vision goes further, and AI is key to its evolution. As AI investments diversify, businesses are increasingly interested in how AI agent-to-agent interactions can be coordinated and secured across different platforms. Tanium intends to support this need via both its native capabilities and the rich integrations and partnerships it has developed with the likes of ServiceNow and Microsoft.
Analyst’s final thoughts: Tanium’s platform impact and value will hinge on ecosystem relevance
Tanium’s strategy is attuned to the infrastructure and operations needs that IT teams are prioritizing, namely, improving endpoint ecosystem visibility, delivering deeper data context, enabling smarter automation, and using AI to augment the tasks that consume admin time. Executing on this vision and strategy over the long term will require Tanium to overcome some critical hurdles:
- First, Tanium’s “beyond solely endpoint visibility” platform ambition is encouraging, but as the vendor continues to develop its proposition into one that supports more proactive ITOps and AI-driven augmentation, these developments must remain commercially tangible. ROI concerns aside, the biggest challenges businesses experience with the adoption of AI and automation capabilities are cost and understanding value. For vendors like Tanium, guiding customers through the value and maturity lifecycle will be vital in maximizing impact.
- Second, as the platform broadens its integration and further leverages AI-powered functionality, Tanium must continue to ensure performance and user trust. Fundamentals around speed and certainty in delivering real-time insights and remediation capabilities cannot be compromised—they are especially important as architectural complexities and reliance on third-party systems increase.
- On the commercial side, Tanium’s AI pricing model that favors usage-based cost over static entitlements is well designed, but this agility must not be lost as AI use by businesses increases. One of the key values that determines the success of consumption-based pricing is ensuring customers have confidence in their ability to monitor and manage it. AI adoption tends to scale quickly once its value is evident, and without transparent controls or forecasting tools, even fair pricing can begin to feel unpredictable.
- Finally, Tanium should continue expanding its presence in the broader enterprise technology ecosystem. Integrations with Microsoft and ServiceNow are encouraging, but Tanium must continue to push the message of how it fits into the wider, interconnected workplace infrastructure. This infrastructure comprises collaboration tools, analytics, and employee experience solutions, to name a few. Of course, the infrastructure and security value propositions will remain important—but Tanium must also focus on communicating the value of its platform in supporting business needs in areas like collaboration, productivity, and business automation.
Appendix
Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
