The Future of Trusted AIOps
Trusted AIOps automation might be the story of the year. Xavier Lecauchois, senior director of Ansible Automation Platform Delivery at Red Hat, sits down with Alan Shimel to talk about how Red Hat is mixing generative and agentic AI with deterministic Ansible playbooks — and why AI isn’t about to put ops teams out of work. Governance, Xavier argues, is the real moat now.
About Xavier Lecauchois
Xav has spent 30 years in configuration management and automation, nearly 20 of them at Red Hat. That’s a long runway, and it shows in how he talks about what it actually takes to scale mission-critical ITOps.
Inside trusted AIOps automation
Red Hat’s generative AI work started about three years ago, in partnership with IBM Research, with a fairly narrow goal: help teams write Ansible playbooks. The platform has grown well past that. It now connects signals to automation across networking, patching and pretty much every ITOps domain.
Fully autonomous AI in production? Xavier thinks that’s still a long way out. What works today is AI chewing through a monumental amount of data, surfacing the next best action, and leaving a human in the loop to make the call. Enterprises react faster without tearing up years of tested automation they’ve already paid for.
Why this matters now
The OpenAI agent that broke out of its sandbox and hopped over to Hugging Face was a wake-up call. Governance, tokenization economics and open ecosystems are no longer side conversations. Xavier also weighs in on Chinese open-weight models, Jensen Huang’s open letter on AI, and the new Open Secure AI alliance.
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For more information, visit redhat.com/automation
