AI in Network Operations: How Much Control? BalticNOG Recap
How much control should AI have in a production network?
That was one of the questions at the centre of this week’s AI panel at BalticNOG in Riga, and it is the one we keep coming back to ourselves.
Andrian Visnevschi joined Alfredo Giordano of Warian, Zachary Smith of Datum and Alissa Sotsjova of Tele2 Eesti on “AI and Operators: Tool, Traffic or Threat?”. Two questions framed the discussion: what AI actually does better than a network engineer, not just faster, and how far you let it act on its own.
Our position has not changed. AI earns its place on the read side, correlating metrics, logs, flows and routing state, and getting to root cause while a human is still opening dashboards. Changes are a different matter. They go through people and deterministic automation, every time.
The next day, Andrian and Nicolai presented “Two years with an AI engineer on shift: what it fixed, what it almost broke, and the rules we wrote afterwards”. More than 100,000 AI investigations across four production networks, and the honest version of that story, including the part where it nearly broke something and the rules that came out of it.
Thank you to the BalticNOG organisers for a genuinely good event, to our fellow panellists, and to everyone who came to talk to us afterwards.
Next stop is RONOG – Romanian Network Operators Group in Bucharest on Monday, where Andrian Visnevschi, Nicolae Musteata, Ion Siretanu and Struta Serghei will be on site and Andrian is speaking on why BGP policy automation still has not reached most networks.
Then MDNOG in Chisinau on 8 and 9 October.
If you are at either, come and find us.
