Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile, engineers are drowning in review tasks that nobody wants to do and nobody does properly.
The firewall team manually reviews every rule change. The WAF policy gets tuned once at deployment and never again. The security review backlog grows faster than it shrinks.
These aren't hard problems. They're tedious problems. And that's exactly where AI helps today.
When was the last time you reviewed the assembly output of your compiler?
I'm guessing never. You write Python or TypeScript or Go, hit build, and trust that something correct comes out the other end. The compiler is a black box. You don't understand its internals. You don't need to.
As InfoWorld notes, when high-level languages first required compilers, many thought no machine could write better assembly than humans. That concern was put to rest long ago.
So why do we treat AI differently?
Every few years, the infrastructure industry invents a new way to sell you complexity.
First it was hardware appliances - proprietary boxes that went end-of-life every three years, forcing expensive upgrades. Then it was proprietary software platforms - lock-in disguised as "integrated solutions." Now it's MCP.
The Model Context Protocol is being positioned as the "USB-C for AI" - a universal standard for connecting AI agents to external systems. 97 million SDK downloads. Big tech backing. The narrative says it's already won.
I don't buy it.
Enterprise IT service management was designed for a world where change was slow, manual, and infrequent. Modern infrastructure is automated, API-driven, and continuously changing — yet governance models have not evolved at the same pace.
Rapid ITIL introduces a modern operating model for IT governance that preserves the core principles of ITIL — control, accountability, and auditability — while enabling high-velocity, automated change across complex enterprise environments.
Rather than treating change as a sequence of approvals and tasks, Rapid ITIL treats change as a declarative commitment to maintain a verified state, continuously enforced and validated through automation and AI.
This article introduces the Rapid ITIL governance model, then presents the Universal Executor — an LLM-driven execution layer that makes continuous governance practical at enterprise scale.
The AI industry is having an accountability moment.
According to recent research, only 6-8% of enterprises have AI agents deployed in production. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by the end of 2026.
That's a massive gap to close in 12 months. And it raises a question the industry has been avoiding: what does a production-ready AI agent actually look like?
With over two decades of experience in Telecoms, Service Providers, Broadcast & Media sectors, ranging from large global corporates to SMEs and Start-ups, Mike has led major technology transformations, cloud migrations, and automation strategies across some of the most complex environments.
Every company I have worked with has always had a transactional firewall process. Yes there are some that use automations in the backend, but from a customer perspective it works like this:
Then thats it!
Thats a bit weird though isn't it, normally when something that is critical to the infrastructure you are deploying is done, you want to have some ownership of it.....you want a receipt, or maybe an easy path to follow it up and see if it is still working.
In the modern networking landscape, automation has become a crucial component of managing increasingly complex infrastructures. Traditional network automation methods, often implemented in a non-declarative manner, have served as the backbone for automating repetitive tasks, reducing human error, and improving overall efficiency. However, these methods come with inherent challenges and limitations that can hinder scalability and flexibility.
Universities are increasingly relying on IT infrastructure to meet the diverse needs of their faculty and students. As both the number of Cloud-based enterprise solutions and the users increase, there is a compelling need for automation and orchestration, and a user-friendly interface accessible to all members of the university community to ensure efficient and effective utilization of resources.
Automating the deployment of services within an organisation is an expensive proposition.
Even with today's automation ready infrastructure, to get that automation being used successfully in production requires a large amount of time from expensive integration resources. In addition, the project management infrastructure that needs to go on top of it.
In this article we discuss how defining and offering your services ahead of that automation spend can produce better and more valuable business outcomes.