NA012 - The Oblong Table

Steinn and Urs pull up chairs at the oblong table with John Howard, Brian Jeggesen and Bart Dorlandt for an unstructured conversation about why network automation adoption is still stuck, what AI actually changes for infrastructure teams, and what conferences and communities owe the people who show up. Brian looks back on running the first CPH^Automate in Copenhagen, John pushes back on the idea that network engineers can't think in systems, and the panel works through the Trail of Bits model of AI assisted, augmented and native organizations, and why you could swap the word "AI" for "automation" and lose nothing. Along the way: CVE packing from vendors, port knocking with MFA, tiered AI policies and guardrails, why conference talks should show the how and not just the result, and John's verdict that the goalposts haven't moved, the ball has. **What we cover:** - Running CPH^Automate and keeping the organic community feel - Why most engineers still think automation means generating configs faster - Systems thinking vs organizational silos and mean time to innocence - AI, investor expectations and what is happening to dev vs ops salaries - Why security adopted AI first, coding second and infrastructure last - Vendors packing 100+ CVEs into one advisory - Knocknoc and closing everything on your border - AI assisted, augmented and native, and the maturity matrix behind it - AI summaries in incident response and tiered AI policies with PII detection - Why clear green/yellow/red guidelines speed up adoption - What conference talks should give the audience to take home - "The goalposts haven't moved, the ball has" - A pragmatic "Mr. Manager" agent that pumps the brakes - Linus Torvalds, AI patches and reading the whole thread - Spotting Claude-generated slides from across the room **At the table:** John Howard, Brian Jeggesen (CPH^Automate), Bart Dorlandt (NLNAM, dreamnetworking.nl) **Links:** How we made Trail of Bits AI-native (talk) | Transforming Network Automation with Temporal | Knocknoc | Network Automation Forum Hosted by Steinn "Steinzi" Bjarnarson and Urs Baumann. YouTube: @networkautomagic #networkautomation #networkautomagic #AI #autocon #networkengineering #community