HN832: AI Agents Are Just Another Tool: How to Integrate With Your Network Automation Strategy (Sponsored)

Ethan Banks (0:00)

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've found your tribe. I'm Ethan Banks. Drew Connery-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, 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 going to 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 going to have that discussion with Chris. Chris 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 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 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 5 having 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 dedicate them as a resource to your network operations team. Because that's what it takes. That's the kind of level of commitment that it takes.

So some people have made that argument. And then there's lots of other alternates and ways that you could go.

Now we've got agentic AI. Let's 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 talk out of this conversation? But it is a decision impacting technology for folks. So could you explain now that agentic AI is in your world, that I Tential, how this changes the whole dedicated developer conversation?

Chris Wade (2:51)

Sure. So I think it's a natural extension to what we've been doing.

A lot of people see it as it's very transformational in what's possible. 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? The way we think about it is we're adding reasoning to the stack. 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.

So let's start there. So it's really about adding reasoning to the deterministic stuff we've been building over time.

Ethan Banks (3:54)

The Cynical Network Engineer would say, artificial intelligence agents, AI agents, don't reason. That's not what that means, Chris. What does that actually mean?

Chris Wade (4:03)

So when we build agents, and a lot of people have their first experience with AI, with ChatGPT, or people have used chatbots, so we become very accustomed of like, how do I craft my engagement with these chatbots to achieve the outcome we want? When we start thinking about building agents, we start building concepts around that so that we have the outcomes we want. So people are used to prompting. So we would tell it, you're going to do a port turn up, this is how you do it. But we can also give these agents tools. We can also give them access to components. We can give them skills to teach them how to do things, like when you're troubleshooting a connection, maybe you ping it, then you trace write it, like we've always been doing in the NOC. So it's really about how we give an ecosystem of tools to these agents, so they provide the outcomes that we want, and how we're really thinking about this, and how customers are thinking about it, is they really want to have that level of determinism facing the network.