Zenity’s selection as a Gartner Cool Vendor in the newly published “Cool Vendors in Agentic AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (TRiSM)” report cements the company’s rapid rise as a specialist in securing the new generation of enterprise AI agents — but it also raises urgent operational and procurement questions for IT leaders who are racing to adopt Copilot-style agents without simultaneously hardening the attack surface they create. The recognition arrives as Zenity’s research team publicly disclosed “AgentFlayer,” a family of zero-click exploit chains demonstrated at Black Hat that forcefully reframes agentic AI from a productivity front to a primary security priority. (businesswire.com) (wired.com)
Agentic AI — software agents that combine reasoning, long-lived state, and the ability to act across enterprise systems — has moved fast from research demos to mainstream deployment across cloud ecosystems. Gartner’s TRiSM guidance and its associated Cool Vendors report respond to that shift by calling out vendors that bring novel approaches to AI trust, risk and security management. Zenity’s Cool Vendor designation is paired with a broader set of recognitions and product milestones the company announced this year, including prior inclusion in Gartner’s Market Guide for AI TRiSM and availability in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. (businesswire.com, zenity.io)
Zenity describes itself as an agent-centric security and governance platform that spans the entire agent lifecycle: discovery and posture assessment at build time, continuous observability and telemetry, and runtime detection plus inline enforcement when agents attempt risky operations. The vendor pairs two capability sets — AI Security Posture Management (AISPM) and AI Detection & Response (AIDR) — to provide both preventative configuration controls and operational disruption of active threats. (zenity.io, businesswire.com)
This is not merely marketing: the security posture for agentic systems is materially different from traditional application risk. Agents routinely reach into email, CRM, file stores, calendars, and third-party connectors. That broad access, combined with models that can interpret and manipulate untrusted content, amplifies the severity and automation potential of prompt-injection and data-exfiltration attacks. Recent high-profile research and vendor responses underline that reality. (wired.com, reuters.com)
Key takeaways from the AgentFlayer research:
That said, buyers and practitioners must treat Cool Vendor recognitions as a starting point, not the finish line. The product claims require technical validation: confirm the integration mechanics, evaluate performance impacts, measure operational friction, and verify telemetry and privacy controls. Inline enforcement is powerful — but only when identity, supply‑chain governance, and adversarial testing are also in place.
For Windows and enterprise IT leaders, the lesson is clear: adopt agentic AI, but do so with runtime guardrails and an evidence‑based procurement process. Zenity’s recognition points to a maturing vendor ecosystem for agentic AI security; the next step for most organizations is to translate that market evolution into validated operational practice — inventory, pilot, red‑team, and measure — before granting agents unfettered production privileges.
Zenity’s Gartner Cool Vendor accolade marks a consequential moment for the agentic AI security market and a necessary pivot for enterprises that plan to scale Copilot Studio, ChatGPT Enterprise, or bespoke agents. The combination of vendor innovation, demonstrable research (AgentFlayer), and analyst attention should accelerate protective projects across the industry — but responsible adoption still requires disciplined validation, identity hardening, and continuous adversarial testing to convert short‑term productivity gains into sustainable, secure automation. (businesswire.com, prnewswire.com)
Source: Business Wire https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250910440978/en/Zenity-Named-a-2025-Gartner-Cool-Vendor-in-Agentic-AI-Trust-Risk-and-Security-Management-Report/
Background / Overview
Agentic AI — software agents that combine reasoning, long-lived state, and the ability to act across enterprise systems — has moved fast from research demos to mainstream deployment across cloud ecosystems. Gartner’s TRiSM guidance and its associated Cool Vendors report respond to that shift by calling out vendors that bring novel approaches to AI trust, risk and security management. Zenity’s Cool Vendor designation is paired with a broader set of recognitions and product milestones the company announced this year, including prior inclusion in Gartner’s Market Guide for AI TRiSM and availability in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. (businesswire.com, zenity.io)Zenity describes itself as an agent-centric security and governance platform that spans the entire agent lifecycle: discovery and posture assessment at build time, continuous observability and telemetry, and runtime detection plus inline enforcement when agents attempt risky operations. The vendor pairs two capability sets — AI Security Posture Management (AISPM) and AI Detection & Response (AIDR) — to provide both preventative configuration controls and operational disruption of active threats. (zenity.io, businesswire.com)
This is not merely marketing: the security posture for agentic systems is materially different from traditional application risk. Agents routinely reach into email, CRM, file stores, calendars, and third-party connectors. That broad access, combined with models that can interpret and manipulate untrusted content, amplifies the severity and automation potential of prompt-injection and data-exfiltration attacks. Recent high-profile research and vendor responses underline that reality. (wired.com, reuters.com)
What Gartner’s Cool Vendor Nod Actually Means
Gartner’s Cool Vendor listings spotlight vendors that offer innovative, impactful, and interesting technology, often before they reach broad enterprise awareness. For CIOs and CISOs, the label is a useful signal — but not a substitute for technical validation. Zenity’s Cool Vendor designation identifies it as a noteworthy provider in the Agentic AI TRiSM space; it does not represent an endorsement of performance or fit for every enterprise use case. The practical value of the callout is twofold:- It signals market recognition for an emergent category (agent runtime enforcement, step-level policy controls). (businesswire.com)
- It increases vendor visibility with procurement and transformation teams that are deciding how to secure Copilot-style deployments and custom agent platforms. (zenity.io)
What Zenity Says It Does — and what’s verifiable
Zenity’s public statements and product pages describe a suite built to secure agents from build time through runtime. The principal, verifiable elements are:- Agent inventory & observability: Continuous discovery of agents, their connectors, and the privileges they hold; mapping agent artifacts for audit and governance. (zenity.io)
- AISPM (AI Security Posture Management): Build‑time scanning and posture checks to flag excessive privileges, misconfigured connectors, or insecure secrets embedded in agent definitions. (zenity.io)
- AIDR (AI Detection & Response): Runtime telemetry, anomaly detection, and automated playbooks to block, quarantine, or roll back suspicious agent actions. (zenity.io)
- Inline, step-level enforcement for agent actions: The platform claims to intercept planned agent “steps” — the discrete operations agents execute (for example: a connector call, a write to a CRM record) — and apply policy before the action completes. Multiple vendor communications and Azure Marketplace previews describe an integration that enforces policies at invocation points used by Copilot Studio agents. (businesswire.com)
AgentFlayer: Why Zenity’s Research Changes the Stakes
The research Zenity Labs released — branded AgentFlayer — demonstrated a class of zero-click, persistent exploits that can silently manipulate and exfiltrate data through agent connectors and injection techniques. Independent investigative reporting and technical write-ups confirm the research, the demonstration venues (Black Hat), and vendor responses. Reporters from major outlets documented the exact mechanics: poisoned documents, hidden instructions that a model will obey, and the use of rendered assets (for example images hosted on a trusted blob-storage domain) as exfiltration channels. (wired.com, zenity.io)Key takeaways from the AgentFlayer research:
- The attacks were zero-click: an agent could be triggered to act by innocuous content shared with a user (or present in a user’s environment) without any explicit action beyond the agent’s routine operation. (wired.com)
- Exfiltration leverages standard agent behaviors — model reasoning, connector APIs, and Markdown/image rendering — to move small secrets out of a tenant without bulk file download. That means standard DLP and network controls can be bypassed if they don’t understand the agent’s reasoning surface. (prnewswire.com, cybersecuritynews.com)
- Vendors issued mitigations rapidly in many cases, but the technique shows the underlying systemic risk of connectors and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines that combine external content and agent logic. (prnewswire.com, wired.com)
Practical implications for enterprise IT and security teams
Agentic AI introduces a set of operational realities that change how organizations must think about identity, telemetry, and incident response. Zenity’s approach — inline enforcement plus lifecycle posture management — is a pragmatic response, but it is not a one-size-fits-all cure. Key implications:- Agents are privileged infrastructure: treat them like service accounts and privileged identities. Inventory, entitlement reviews, rotation of credentials, and strict connector allow‑lists are mandatory.
- Buildtime controls are necessary but not sufficient: runtime interception matters because agents evolve, read new inputs, and can be manipulated in production. Inline control at the action/step level reduces the window between exploitation and mitigation.
- Detection must be cognizant of agent context: forensic artifacts should include the planner steps, tool invocations, connector call parameters, and any retrieved content that shaped a decision. Generic SIEM logs alone are usually inadequate.
- Red‑teaming and adversarial testing must include prompt‑injection, RAG‑poisoning, and memory‑persistence scenarios. These tests should simulate zero‑click flows and connector‑based exfiltration to measure real-world resilience.
- Start with an inventory and prioritization of high‑risk agents (those with access to PII, payment systems, or production workflows).
- Run vendor inline controls in monitoring mode to measure false positives and latency impact.
- Tune policies and automated playbooks, then move to enforcement for high‑risk actions.
- Integrate agent telemetry into SOC playbooks and SOAR pipelines to accelerate incident response.
Critical analysis: strengths, gaps, and operational risks
Zenity’s strengths are clear and consequential:- Agent-centric model: Focusing on the step/action dimensions of agents — rather than treating agents as generic cloud workloads — provides the fidelity needed for practical policy enforcement and forensic clarity. That alignment with agent execution surfaces is arguably the only scalable way to protect Copilot-style deployments at scale.
- Lifecycle coverage: The combination of AISPM and AIDR addresses both pre-deployment misconfigurations and in‑flight threats, which is the defense-in-depth mix analysts recommend. (zenity.io)
- Research-led credibility: The company’s public research (AgentFlayer) underscores domain expertise and creates urgency that can accelerate enterprise adoption of runtime controls. Independent reporting verifies the research details. (prnewswire.com, wired.com)
- Opaque enforcement mechanics: Public materials confirm inline enforcement exists for Copilot Studio agents, but vendors routinely omit low-level architectural detail. Security teams must validate whether enforcement is truly inline or mediated via proxying connectors, and whether the approach introduces single points of failure, data leakage, or unacceptable latency. Ask for technical architecture diagrams and deployment models as part of procurement.
- Identity & entitlement dependencies: Inline prevention is only effective when agents use granular, least-privilege identities. If agents operate via oversized service principals or shared secrets, policy enforcement faces limits. Identity hygiene remains the foundational control.
- False positives & productivity trade-offs: Aggressive inline enforcement can block legitimate business processes. Vendors must demonstrate mature policy templates, tuning workflows, and low false‑positive rates in enterprise-scale PoCs.
- Vendor concentration and lock-in: Because agent platforms and connectors are tightly coupled to cloud vendors (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Salesforce), enterprises must weigh the operational cost of adding third‑party enforcement layers vs. waiting for native platform guardrails — and the procurement/legal implications of integrating telemetry with third‑party security vendors.
Questions every procurement and security team should ask
To move from vendor recognition to validated capability, procurement teams should insist on objective evidence:- Provide a clear technical architecture diagram showing how inline enforcement is inserted into agent execution. Does enforcement sit in a Microsoft-provided runtime hook, an MCP mediation point, or a proxy that intercepts connector calls?
- Share performance and SLA metrics: typical added latency per agent action, throughput limits, and proven scale (agents per tenant under test).
- Deliver telemetry and privacy details: what logs are retained, where are they stored, how are credentials or sensitive artifacts handled, and what is the retention policy?
- Supply independent or third‑party test results showing false-positive/rate metrics and the outcome of adversarial testing against representative enterprise workflows.
- Demonstrate integrations with SOC tooling: SIEM/EDR/SOAR forwarding, incident playbooks, and escalation paths for blocked actions.
The wider market context and alternative signals
Zenity’s Cool Vendor recognition comes at a time when analysts are cautioning about the maturity of agentic AI projects and the practical ROI of many deployments. Gartner’s broader research forecasts a material fraction of agent projects will be canceled over the next few years without proper governance; at the same time, analyst coverage and independent reporting show rising demand for runtime controls and agent-centric security platforms. Other vendors named in Gartner’s Cool Vendor report and related PR activity underscore that a competitive ecosystem is emerging, not just a single‑vendor solution set. Enterprises should therefore evaluate multiple vendors and consider heterogeneous defenses rather than a single contracted supplier. (reuters.com, prnewswire.com)Recommended short-term playbook for Windows/enterprise IT teams
- Inventory: Map every agent, connector, and the data classifications they access. Prioritize by privilege and regulatory risk.
- Pilot: Deploy inline enforcement in monitoring-only mode on a small number of representative agents (finance, HR, and customer‑facing agents are high priority). Measure latency, false positives, and SOC integration points.
- Red-team: Run adversarial prompt-injection, RAG‑poisoning, and zero‑click scenarios to validate detection and blocking behavior. Use Zenity’s published research patterns as a baseline. (zenity.io, wired.com)
- Identity: Reconfigure agent identities to follow least privilege; avoid shared service principals where possible. Rotate keys and enforce connection allow‑lists.
- Governance & training: Add agent lifecycle processes, approval gates for new connectors, and training for citizen developers who build agents.
Final assessment — why the Cool Vendor status matters for WindowsForum readers
Zenity’s Gartner Cool Vendor designation is more than a promotional milestone: it is a visible market signal that agent runtime enforcement and step-level telemetry are now enterprise-grade priorities. Their AgentFlayer research — independently confirmed by major outlets — shows why those priorities are not academic: real-world, zero‑click exploits can subvert agent behavior and exfiltrate data without human intervention, and organizations that ignore runtime enforcement will increasingly be operating with blind spots in their defences. (businesswire.com, wired.com)That said, buyers and practitioners must treat Cool Vendor recognitions as a starting point, not the finish line. The product claims require technical validation: confirm the integration mechanics, evaluate performance impacts, measure operational friction, and verify telemetry and privacy controls. Inline enforcement is powerful — but only when identity, supply‑chain governance, and adversarial testing are also in place.
For Windows and enterprise IT leaders, the lesson is clear: adopt agentic AI, but do so with runtime guardrails and an evidence‑based procurement process. Zenity’s recognition points to a maturing vendor ecosystem for agentic AI security; the next step for most organizations is to translate that market evolution into validated operational practice — inventory, pilot, red‑team, and measure — before granting agents unfettered production privileges.
Zenity’s Gartner Cool Vendor accolade marks a consequential moment for the agentic AI security market and a necessary pivot for enterprises that plan to scale Copilot Studio, ChatGPT Enterprise, or bespoke agents. The combination of vendor innovation, demonstrable research (AgentFlayer), and analyst attention should accelerate protective projects across the industry — but responsible adoption still requires disciplined validation, identity hardening, and continuous adversarial testing to convert short‑term productivity gains into sustainable, secure automation. (businesswire.com, prnewswire.com)
Source: Business Wire https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250910440978/en/Zenity-Named-a-2025-Gartner-Cool-Vendor-in-Agentic-AI-Trust-Risk-and-Security-Management-Report/
