During NetBrain LIVE, we dug into where AI truly stands in network operations with Enterprise Strategy Group’s Jim Frey. His take was clear and straight to the point: AI is at a major turning point, but widespread trust hasn’t fully caught up.
Teams want proof before they let AI influence critical decisions. They want to see real results—both from peers and inside their own environments. Once that trust builds, productivity gains tend to accelerate quickly.
The bigger trend he highlighted is unavoidable: networks are evolving too fast for manual operations to keep pace. With new AI-driven workloads appearing inside organizations almost weekly, trying to run everything by hand just isn’t sustainable anymore. Ignoring AI isn’t really an option.
The smartest place to begin? Start where the daily pain lives. Configuration drift. Unapproved changes. Surprise devices showing up out of nowhere. Early issue detection before something breaks downstream. These are the tasks where AI can prove its value quickly and consistently.
AI is also becoming essential on the observability side. Networks fire out massive amounts of telemetry—far more than humans can analyze meaningfully. AI cuts through that noise by spotting trends, correlating events, and surfacing what truly matters.
The message coming out of NetBrain LIVE was straightforward: start small, automate the repetitive grind, build trust one win at a time, and let AI handle the volume and velocity modern networks throw at you. This shift isn’t about replacing engineers—it’s about giving them the leverage to operate at the scale their environments now demand.