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Recently I've been having conversations with IT (mostly networking) teams about incorporating AI solutions, and the first questions I have are 🧵:

The answer to the first question is critical. For some, AI is an initiative handed down by leadership with no clear direction or no clear problem to solve. Also, sometimes the direction and problem are clear, but it can be solved more easily and for far less cost than a sophisticated AI solution.

The answers to the second question are just as important. The data we use in NetOps is both structured (metrics, flows, etc), and unstructured (tickets, email, TAC call transcripts, certain types of logs, etc). The workflow to deal with this in a unified manner is more complex than many realize.

Much of the data we deal with in NetOps is real-time telemetry requiring significant effort to clean, process, store, and analyze quickly enough to be useful for a production environment.