CIO Think Tank: AI-native networking

For example, Harish Bhatt, head of engineering at Early Warning, noted, “In this hybrid world of cloud and on-prem, predictability of the network is very important. When we use multiple network providers, sometimes the links [between providers] kind of flicker, and in financial applications, it becomes very hard to lose even a five-second blip.” This is one sort of operational challenge that IT leaders think AI can address.

For starters, CIOs hope that AI’s ability to find patterns in huge data sets will provide a broader view of network and service performance. “In our network, a lot of people have the ability to detect areas of improvement within the application stack or the full tech stack,” said Heather Milam, VP of technology at Travelport. AI, she said, could “free up the time to actually monitor what’s going on from the top to the bottom and identify opportunities to make it more efficient throughout the whole end-to-end service, versus just within the network.”

“We manage some locally hosted energy solutions where there’s a control network, which may be feeding into a local network, which then feeds into the cloud, which then comes through another set of firewalls….” said Steven Nieland, VP of software engineering and controls at Faith Technologies. “There’s a bunch of different translations of data as it goes through that pipeline, and trying to track problems can be very time intensive. We hope AI can serve as another set of eyes there.”