KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 showed a shift in cloud-native computing with changes across the tech stack from Kubernetes capabilities to AI operationalization, from security gatekeeping to engineering ownership, and from vendor lock-in to composable best-in-class solutions. Across 35+ analyst briefings in Atlanta, industry leaders revealed five defining themes: the urgent challenge of making agentic AI production-ready (with 65% of projects facing abandonment by 2028), the injection of security in the CI/CD pipeline, the maturation of open source projects like OpenTelemetry and WebAssembly into business strategies, the enterprise demand for customer choice over all-in-one platforms, and the evolution of platform engineering as a distinct role driving innovation at scale.