CrowdStrike Charlotte AI, Atera Autopilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot are among the list makers.
Cybersecurity tools leveraging artificial intelligence. MSP platforms resolving help-desk issues without human intervention. And the AI assistants that helped seed this new technology era and continue leading the pack in capabilities.
These are some of the hottest AI tools of 2025 that solution providers have been experimenting with internally to increase operational efficiency and become a better channel partner and externally with their customers to prepare them for what it means to run a business in a new technology landscape. And if solution providers haven’t been experimenting with these tools—perhaps they deserve a look.
For this list, CRN compiled some of the most popular AI tools on the market and some that have shown promising starts in the first half of 2025.
[RELATED: The 10 Hottest Cybersecurity Tools And Products Of 2025 (So Far)]
Gartner expects worldwide generative AI spending to total $644 billion this year, up from 76 percent from 2024. GenAI services spending should hit $27.8 billion.
CRN has also published lists of some of the other hottest tools and products of 2025, including those in cybersecurity, big data and tools specific to MSPs.
Read on for more of CRN’s picks for some of the hottest AI tools of 2025 so far.
OpenAI ChatGPT
The original text-generating tool that kicked off this era of AI mania continues to show innovation is possible in AI’s year three.
ChatGPT’s San Francisco-based maker OpenAI has been releasing its latest models in the tool, including GPT-4.5, improving the chat tool’s abilities to recognize patterns, draw connections and generate insight without reasoning. GPT-4.1 has been used for web development and coding, with a “mini” small language model (SLM) that is faster.
The o3-pro model added in ChatGPT in June can search the web, analyze files, reason about visual inputs, use Python, personalize responses using memory and conduct other tasks. Users also gained a library in the sidebar for images made with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT added a record mode for capturing meetings and voice notes with the option to transcribe, summarize and turn them into follow-ups, plans, code and other outputs. Its advanced voice capability was updated to improve intonation and naturalness.
OpenAI might be showing some growing interest in the channel, this week naming HCLTech—No. 16 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—one of its first strategic services partners with a multiyear strategic collaboration deal.
ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu plans support 3 million paid business users, up from 2 million in February, according to CNBC.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft’s flagship AI tool has also gained a host of upgrades this year, including more photo-realistic image generation and text spelling accuracy in M365 Copilot Chat.
Chat also added multiturn interactions with image uploads for more complex and detailed user queries, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant.
Copilot also added the ability for users to turn documents, meetings and files into podcast-style “audio overviews” with two AI-generated hosts who even banter, plus summarize high-priority emails in Outlook and whole PowerPoint presentations. Copilot In Excel can analyze tens of thousands of rows. And in OneDrive, Copilot allows users to ask plain English questions about the content of stored images.
The AI tool also gained more metrics around Intelligent Recap meetings in the Teams collaboration application so that users can better understand summarized and recapped meeting activity.
AI administrators gained more agent metadata around capabilities, knowledge sources, custom actions and other measurables—plus a Copilot Control System framework for managing agents that extend Copilot’s capabilities across business workflows.
The new low-code tuning capability in Copilot promises to clean entire datasets while labeling less than 10 percent of the contents.
Microsoft has about 500,000 partners worldwide, according to the vendor. Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in April that Copilot has “hundreds of thousands” of customers worldwide, with use up threefold year over year and “a record number of customers returning to buy more seats.”
Google Gemini
So far this year, Google has added its video-generation model Veo 3 to the Gemini AI application, with native support for sound effects, background noises and character dialogue.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud tools vendor has also started bringing Gemini to glasses and headsets through Android XR and expanded direct editing in Gemini of uploaded images. Its Gemini 2.5 model comes with a Pro edition for large datasets and complex reasoning and a Flash version focused on speed, efficiency and lower latency.
Google’s Sec-Gemini v1 cybersecurity model also aims to apply near-real-time cybersecurity knowledge and tooling to incident root cause analysis, threat analysis, vulnerability impact understanding and other security workflows.
More Gemini users gained access to AI overviews and the ability to apply Google Search history to Gemini responses as well in 2025. Gemini mobile app users received the ability to use Deep Research to create research reports on any topic to save time on finding answers.
The Gemini AI app has more than 400 million monthly active users, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in May.
Google’s top channel goals for 2025 include enabling partners to develop an AI strategy and sell AI solutions and improving partner profitability, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Salesforce Agentforce 3
Salesforce released the third version of its Agentforce artificial intelligence agent development platform this year, with 100-plus new prebuilt industry actions to hasten time-to-value, managed support of Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server hosting through Heroku and increased speed and response streaming.
The platform also gained web search for Agentforce data libraries, and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization for Agentforce’s public sector customers.
The San Francisco-based enterprise application vendor—which has about 16,000 partners worldwide—also forecast major updates coming for the platform, including a new Agentforce Command Center available in August.
In May, Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said the vendor has done about 8,000 Agentforce deals across every industry, with 4,000 paid Agentforce deals and $100 million in Agentforce annual recurring revenue. About 800 Salesforce customers are in production with Agentforce.
IBM Watsonx
IBM continues to invest in organic innovation of its Watsonx suite of AI offers while also setting the stage for bringing AI to another level through its acquisition strategy.
This year, Watsonx.data has rolled out integration software to orchestrate data access and engineering across diverse integration styles and formats in a single interface, plus intelligence software to transform how organizations leverage AI to simplify data governance.
In June, IBM launched Watsonx BI, an AI analytics agent for using natural language to engage with marketing, sales, operations, finance and other business data. IBM has also extended Watsonx capabilities into other parts of the portfolio, including Maximo Assistant’s conversational AI.
The rest of 2025 will show how IBM plans to continue combining the capabilities of Watsonx with DataStax—that acquisition closed May 28—as well as HashiCorp, which IBM officially acquired in February, plus any other acquisitions the tech giant has in store.
IBM’s top channel goals for 2025 include increasing the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Amazon Q
Amazon continues to innovate its Q AI-powered chatbot, with updates in 2025 including response customization for how Q Business applications generate and format responses to user queries.
The Seattle-based cloud giant also updated Q Business to reduce hallucinations in chat responses and support the ingestion of audio and video data for analysis. Amazon also made scenario forecasting generally available for Q in the QuickSight business intelligence service.
The vendor also added support for more languages for the Q in Connect extension for customer service, the ability for Q Developer to provide personalized Amazon Web Services cost optimization recommendations and a new natural language, agentic coding experience within the Q Developer’s integrated development environment.
Amazon has about 130,000 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Verkada Video Security
Verkada showed a promising start to the year with a $200 million Series E round of funding to spread its integrated AI video security and environmental monitoring tools.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based vendor recently debuted a new dual head camera and enhanced alerting capabilities on its Command platform. The camera offers two viewing angles from a single install point, an advanced on-board processor, 2.55X optical zoom in each sensor and AI-based analytics and alerts.
Verkada is part of CRN’s 2025 Partner Program Guide and has more than 8,400 partners worldwide.
CrowdStrike Charlotte AI
CrowdStrike introduced two new agentic AI tools for its Charlotte AI platform, with the launch of Charlotte AI Agentic Response and Charlotte AI Agentic Workflows.
Charlotte AI Agentic Response can boost security operations productivity through providing automated answers to questions that an analyst often would pose during an investigation—leading to faster analysis of root causes, mapping of lateral movement and guidance for the analyst’s next actions, CrowdStrike said.
Meanwhile, Charlotte AI Agentic Workflows provides drag-and-drop workflows—leveraging LLMs—that provide analysts with a way to easily embed AI reasoning within automated playbooks in Falcon Fusion SOAR, according to the Austin, Texas-based company.
CrowdStrike’s top channel goals for 2025 include improving partner profitability, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Atera Autopilot
Atera Autopilot is an AI platform designed to autonomously detect and resolve tier-one IT issues in real time without human intervention.
Embedded into communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, Autopilot functions as a junior IT technician and handles common requests such as password resets and printer issues. Powered by agentic AI, Autopilot currently resolves up to 40 percent of Tier 1 IT issues, a figure Atera expects to grow. Even when escalation is needed, the tool prepares detailed diagnostics and suggested fixes, saving technicians up to 90 percent of the preliminary work.
Built with Microsoft on Azure OpenAI, Autopilot ensures enterprise-grade privacy and compliance. In the future, Atera aims to further enhance Autopilot’s diagnostic scope and increase resolution rates over the next year.
Snowflake Intelligence
At its Snowflake Summit 2025 conference earlier this month, AI data cloud company Snowflake debuted Snowflake Intelligence, a conversational data analytics tool powered by intelligent data agents that allows users to ask natural language questions and uncover actionable insight from both structured tables and unstructured documents.
Snowflake Intelligence runs inside existing Snowflake environments, inheriting all security controls, data masking and governance policies, according to the company. It is designed to unify data from Snowflake, Box, Google Drive, Workday, Zendesk and other sources.
Snowflake also previewed Data Science Agent, an agentic companion that the company says boosts data scientists’ productivity by automating routine machine learning model development tasks.
The Bozeman, Mont.-based vendor has about 12,600 partners worldwide.
