The announcement overnight of ControlUp’s acquisition of Unipath genuinely feels like one of those moments worth pausing on — not just because it’s a smart business move, but because of what it says about where our industry is heading.
If you haven’t crossed paths with ControlUp yet, it’s worth understanding why this matters. ControlUp has rapidly established itself as a global leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management, earning recognition as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools — marking the second consecutive year in that position and affirming its completeness of vision and ability to execute at scale across physical, virtual, and cloud endpoints. Alongside that, the platform has been named a Customers’ Choice in the 2025 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer, with exceptionally high user ratings reflecting the real-world impact it delivers.
Congratulations first to my friend Jed Ayres and the entire ControlUp team, and equally to the talented people at Unipath who helped make this possible. Deals of this nature don’t occur without a shared vision and belief that there’s a better way to solve tangible problems — and that confidence comes through clearly here.
For a long time, IT has been very good at monitoring. We have dashboards, alerts, and metrics that tell us what’s broken. What we’ve been far less good at is turning that insight into action without adding more pressure to already stretched service desk teams.
Most of us know the traditional process all too well. A user logs a support ticket when something stops working. It sits in a queue for an hour or two before being picked up, triaged, passed to another team — sometimes the wrong one — investigated, escalated, and eventually resolved. In the meantime, productivity is impacted, meetings are missed, and IT is stuck firefighting. It works, but it’s slow, reactive, and costly in ways that often go unseen.
This is where AI, used in the right way, starts to matter.
What truly excites me about the ControlUp and Unipath combination is the focus on AI that doesn’t just observe problems, but helps identify, prioritise — and increasingly resolve — them. ControlUp already collects telemetry in near real time and drives proactive insight; pairing that with Unipath’s agentic AI framework advances the ability to autonomously diagnose issues and generate remediations based on context, data, and outcomes — without requiring IT teams to build and maintain scripts or workflows.
For organisations, the promise here is meaningful: fewer disruptions, faster recovery, reduced mean time to resolution, and a shift away from repetitive ticket cycles toward intelligent automation that learns as it goes. Employees stay productive. IT teams can finally focus less on constant triage and more on strategic work.
It’s also encouraging to see a pragmatic view of AI. These tools are strongest when they focus on the problems they understand — the issues they can reliably detect and resolve. The real opportunity ahead lies in how platforms like ControlUp continue to evolve to highlight what they don’t yet know, helping teams identify emerging issues and build new intelligence over time rather than over-promising autonomy.
Taken together, this feels like a meaningful and very positive step toward a true Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) strategy. Not autonomy for the sake of it, but intelligent, well-governed automation that knows when to act, when to recommend, and when to escalate.
As Unipath is progressively integrated into ControlUp’s leading DEX platform throughout 2026, it will be fascinating to see how this momentum continues to build — further enhancing AI-driven remediation, reducing friction across the endpoint, and continuing to raise the bar for what great digital experience looks like.
Well done to Jed, and to everyone across both teams. This feels like progress done properly.
If you are interested in exploring how ControlUp solutions with Unipath could work for your organisation, contact Com-X. As Australia’s leading specialists in digital workspaces and cyber security, we can help you raise your digital employee experience.
