"A Computer Must Never Make a Management Decision." Can We Let AI Run Our Infrastructure?#

Marc Stadtherr · Kumorai Inc.

• Why: The governance counterpart to the AI enthusiasm: the binding constraint on safe AI adoption is systemic legibility — can your organization even explain what its infrastructure is, who owns it, and what intent governs it? This framing has obvious resonance with identity and ownership models.
• What: The claim is we have an "execution surplus and an understanding deficit": more tools, less coherence. Four recurring symptoms — operational drag, fragmented automation, broken governance, and an AI readiness gap — all traced to the same root: no unified model reconciling Source of Truth (what infrastructure should look like) with System of Record (what it looks like now). The proposed fix is an "Infrastructure Intent Control Plane" that renders, encodes, and reconciles both.
• How: An advise-versus-act boundary: AI may act only when intent, ownership, and reconciliation are explicit and continuous; it must explain itself whenever any of the three is missing. Three grounding scenarios show the failure modes: a 300-site SD-WAN migration stalled on unknown owners and dependencies; an MSP outage with fragmented accountability; a 15k-rule firewall cleanup impossible without explicit intent ("maintain until Q2 decommissioning" vs "delete this rule").
• Where applicable: Conceptual, with vendor framing (Kumorai) rather than a deployed system. Still, the 30-second test it implies — can you explain what happens when the AI is wrong? — is a useful gate for any agentic-ops roadmap, and it converges with the supervision tiers in the Lerena talk.