The road to autonomous network goes through humans in the loop, says Venkat Pullela, Keysight’s CTO of Networking
With AI being on every CTO’s vision board, a question they often get asked is: how close are we to autonomous networks?
As much of the industry waits breathlessly for self-driving networks to arrive, increasingly, it’s starting to feel like — despite the milestones and breakthroughs — a fully autonomous network, one that can think, learn, adapt, and take decisions with no human intervention, might not be the goal after all.
Is AI enough on its own?
The concept of autonomous networks is built on the logic that AI agents armed with self-x capabilities be in charge of the tasks. They deploy, configure, monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot the network as humans do — but without them in the loop. The agents work on repeat and retire when they need to. A construct, which if you break down, comes to three distinct elements — AI agents, closed-loop automation, and intent-driven networking.
From the sound of it, it is a tempting idea — to leave the wearisome duties of a nebulous, ever-growing network to bots that have the capability and agency to get the job done. But human oversight is vital, almost like a gut check, to determine whether the idea has legs.
“AI is like an intern,” says Venkat Pullela, CTO of Networking at Keysight, and it should be treated as such. Because agents could overdeliver in one case, and underdeliver in the next.
Pullela who is also associated with industry bodies like the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), sees both the good and the bad. As a public-facing leader, he works closely with executives in hyperscaler companies, hardware vendors, and software firms that are actively embracing AI in all corners of the business.
“Practically everyone’s future plans at this time are based on AI. It’s here to stay. People are convinced. You don’t need to convince them anymore,” he says.
This marks a massive shift of mindset. He remembers not to long ago AI was an outlier that was thrown at infinite scale problems that humans could not solve: finding anomalies in traffic patterns, fuzz testing to spot bugs and vulnerabilities in software programs, and mitigating errors through automation of repetitive tasks.
“AI was always part of it. We were only using it slightly differently,” he says.
Human-assisted autonomy
Post-ChatGPT, industries started considering AI in earnest. Organizations started integrating the technology in small and big things until it was deep in the DNA of businesses.
Pullela is both optimistic and cautious. He acknowledges the value of conversational chatbots and intelligent multi-agent systems whose ability to support proactive network management, predictive maintenance and resource optimization have unlocked new levels of network autonomy not seen before.
However, he also says, it’s important to remember that the impact could be varied depending on the level of supervision. Unchecked implementation can lead to chaos, as has been witnessed by many companies in the past that have made the mistake of relying overmuch on AI coding tools.
“The engineers still have to own the code they generate,” he says. “A solution engineer is able to show possibilities, but ultimately a middleware or a backend engineer has to come and build it. There is a hand off.”
Pullela reminds that having guardrails in place is an important next step as the industry pushes towards greater network autonomy — a matter that is still work in progress.
“The guardrails part of it is the biggest challenge,” he notes. “We are getting to explainable AI, but on the guardrail side, there is still not the same level of maturity.”
Roles too are evolving as AI introduces low-touch networking, turning hands-on tasks like coding and testing into auto-complete functions. Pullela predicts that in the future, hardware will be shipped out-of-the-box with AI agents, providing a white-glove experience right from Day1 and beyond.
But that future will not be without humans in the loop.
“Autonomous networks and autonomous systems are the holy grail…We are not fully there yet, but my gut feeling is it’ll evolve with humans there in the loop.”
