Enterprise IT teams are running more AI-driven automation than they can see. Riverbed's latest platform update tries to change that, expanding its Aternity digital experience management suite with tools designed specifically for the governance and visibility challenges that arise when agents and AI assistants start acting on behalf of IT operations.
The company announced six new capabilities on Tuesday, grouped under what it is calling a Zero Disruption vision — a shift from reactive incident management towards preventing failures before they affect employees. Riverbed says its customers executed more than 250 million AI-driven automation steps in 2025, and positions that scale as both the proof of demand and the argument for tighter oversight.
The headline addition is AI Assurance, a capability that will monitor AI adoption, shadow AI usage, and agentic behaviour across enterprise workflows. The feature, expected in summer 2026, is aimed at the growing number of organisations deploying AI assistants without visibility into where they are being used or what decisions they are making. Alongside it, IQ 4.0 introduces an agentic framework for authorised AI-driven actions, and Riverbed Q extends conversational AI into Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, and Slack.
On the observability side, Aternity Replay 2.0 extends session replay from individual users to fleet-wide visibility, while High Frequency Analytics captures telemetry at one-second resolution to catch intermittent issues traditional monitoring misses. APM+ connects application behaviour and transaction data to employee experience, addressing one of the most common frustrations in enterprise IT: knowing an application is degraded but not being able to pinpoint why.
"Riverbed is driving this prevention-first approach by combining full-fidelity telemetry across devices, networks, and applications with experience insights. Together, these capabilities enable IT teams to improve visibility across complex, distributed environments while accelerating the identification and resolution of issues before they affect employee productivity or customer experience," said Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research.
APM+, Riverbed IQ, Aternity Replay, and Data Express are generally available. AI Assurance and High Frequency Analytics are expected in summer 2026.
