Oct. 28 event to test who turns on autonomous operations

The event follows HPE's Networking Investor Day a month earlier, where the company argued the network has shifted from plumbing to strategic infrastructure for AI. Rami Rahim, executive vice president and general manager of HPE Networking, said AI is reshaping the technology stack and making the network more strategic — a message investors heard as a growth story, while Kerravala suggests CIOs should hear it as an operating model story.

Speakers at the investor day sketched the operational gap. Sujai Hajela of HPE campus and branch distilled the self-driving network philosophy as 'Up is not the same as good,' and ServiceNow's Sajeev Nair described consolidating point products that kept creating fragmentation in telemetry, cutting a manual workload from 2,000 to 3,000 hours a year to fewer than 60. HPE's David Hughes made the case that the network as a sensor can detect and contain threats, extending zero trust to agents and devices.

Security is a pacing factor: Anthropic's Claude Mythos has helped vetted organizations identify more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities, and Kerravala notes a tremendous amount of network infrastructure more than a decade old lacks the features to protect against AI-generated threats. That, along with fragmented data and unclear accountability, is why the blockers to agentic AI are mostly human and operational rather than model-related.