HN832: AI Agents Are Just Another Tool: How to Integrate With Your Network Automation Strategy (Sponsored)
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What is the episode’s opening premise about AI and network automation?
Welcome to Heavy Networking. If you've ever had an argument about whether or not it's okay to disable Spanning Tree because you're running a layer three fabric, you found your tribe. I'm Ethan Banks. Drew Conry Murray is not here because we're in Munich today at Autocon 5, and the set we were provided with only involves two chairs. So that means me and my guest, uh Chris Wade, CTO and co-founder of Itential. And Chris has been on the show a number of times before, as Itential has been right. At the forefront of network automation and orchestration for many years now, and they've figured out how artificial intelligence fits into the mix. So let me give you a quick take on this. AI has Let's say it's complicated network automation for us.
So we've got these new questions we're trying to answer as an industry now, such as if AI generates code for me, do I need to learn Python? Should I be writing a script to gather network information? If I can dispatch an AI agent to gather that information for me instead? Are there skills that I thought I was gonna have to have that I can skip now? If AI is going to stand in that gap for me. What other automation tools that maybe I've been using for a while? They just don't matter, or maybe they're obsolete because AI has shown up. So we're gonna have that discussion with Chris. Uh Chris and and and his company, Itential, have been right in the guts of network automation long enough to feel the disruption of AI and distinguish the hype from the reality.
And uh and they've added AI to the tool mix here. So Chris. Welcome back to Heavy Networking. You've been on a number of times before over the years. And I want to I want to set up the conversation for us this way. We got to a point with network automation. We're here at AutoCon. We're at Autocon Five having a you know yet an an ongoing conversation about network automation. And a lot of the presentations that have happened at this conference are about Hey, if you're serious about building a network automation platform for your company, you need a developer. You need someone that's committed to this. Now it could be a network engineer that's devoted to the maintenance, the care and feeding and customization of your network automation platform.
Or you're going to bring in a developer and make them dedicate them as a resource to your network operations team. Um, because that's what it takes. That you that's that's the kind of level. Level of commitment that it takes. So some people have made that argument. And then there's there's lots of other, you know, alternates and ways that you could go. Now we've got agentic AI goes come in. We've been talking a lot about it to the point of it frustrating the heck out of some engineers who say can we not can we not talk out of this conversation? Sure. But but it is a decision impacting technology, you know, for folks. So so could you explain now that agentic AI is in your world at Itential, um, how this changes the whole dedicated developer conversation?
How are the new AI‑generated‑code questions reshaping network automation roles?
Sure. So I think it's a natural extension to what we've been doing. Um a lot of people see it as as it's very transformational in what's possible. Um, but I don't think it's a replacement as much as a lot of people think. People are talking about reasoning versus determinism and can agents replace maybe my scripts or the automations I've built. Um the way we think about it is we're at we're adding reasoning to the stack. So So we've all been building determinism for years, whether it's playbooks or scripts or automation components. And that level of determinism requires us to code all these things, as you say, right? So I need a developer. Maybe I'm running it on Tuesday and I have errors, I have logic, the device is offline.
So every time that happens, I have to care and feed for the technical debt that's associated with my automation. And with reasoning, we can really balance that determinism with reasoning to overcome a lot of these corner cases, a lot of this custom development. Um, so let's start there. So it's really about adding reasoning to the deterministic stuff stuff we've been building over time.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the episode’s opening premise about AI and network automation?
0:00–2:51
2
How are the new AI‑generated‑code questions reshaping network automation roles?
2:51–9:23
3
What does “agentic AI” mean for Itential and how does it differ from traditional scripts?
9:23–14:08
4
How does reasoning complement deterministic automation in Itential’s platform?
14:08–21:29
5
What is an “agent harness” and how are tools, skills, and prompts combined to build agents?
21:29–32:59
6
How does Itential ensure governance, authentication, and auditability for AI agents?
32:59–43:55
7
What is Flow AI, and when will it be generally available for customers?
43:55–45:36
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Heavy Networking
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