How NetOps Can Embrace AI to Lead Enterprise Innovation#

Chris Wade · CTO — Itential

• Why: The closing keynote and the clearest articulation of where the field believes it's heading: agents, skills, and MCP as complementary layers of an operating model. Vendor vantage point (Itential CTO), so read it as direction-setting rather than deployed practice.
• What: Agents decide WHEN (orchestrators with observe→think→act loops), Skills encode HOW (procedural knowledge in ~100-token SKILL.md files — "runbooks turned into agent-consumable procedures"), MCP provides WHAT (a "USB-C for AI" connector to databases, APIs, tools). An honest capability map for 2026: LLMs are strong on protocols, RFCs and general reasoning; weak on vendor specifics behind paywalls, unpublished APIs, and TAC-ticket knowledge.
• How: A build/execute/operate arc: build agents doing spec-driven development of deterministic automations (LLMs have vastly more training data for native code than Ansible YAML); centrally-run "execute" agent fleets with tools fixed and limited at build time (a read-only device-health agent literally lacks the tool to change config); and "operate" agents managed by engineers like team members, picking tools at runtime. A worked NOC connectivity-troubleshooting agent shows restricted tools, skills, and policies in action. Notably, customer conversations put AI governance and guardrails above the question of whether agents functionally work.
• Where applicable: Vision-stage. The NAF-block framing appears throughout (down to musing "Network Agentic Forum? — can we consider agents as users?"), which is a strong signal the framework intends to absorb the agentic wave.