The biggest problem with AI agents, say enterprises, is that all you can easily find about them is trivial and wrong. Yes, it’s possible to infer some useful truths from basic agentic comments online, but the details that a savvy planner would need to make agent decisions and deployments is missing. One AI type told me “There are agentic AI myths, and agentic AI misses.” Let’s take a look at both to try to set the record straight.| Andover Intel
One of the hot topics in telecom these days is the role AI could play in managing opex. I blogged about this a bit recently, and got some LinkedIn comments. The operative presumption is that telecom could cut jobs through the use of AI, and Light Reading said that “The combined workforce of the 20 operators tracked by Light Reading shrank by another 52,000 jobs or 4% last year, and AI is only just getting started.” Truth is that job-cutting at telcos is hardly new, and AI hasn’t played ...| Andover Intel
A bit ago, I commented on a LinkedIn post that asked whether we are repeating, with AI agents, the mistakes of NFV. My comment was “The issues here are deeper, I think. The essential problem with NFV was that operations is inherently an event-driven, stateful, process and the architecture mandated by the NFV ISG wasn’t that. Agentic AI is in a sense a component in an application, and in order to frame its architecture you have to decide what the overall application model is. I think that ...| Andover Intel
Here’s an important truth for you; for telcos, AI is dangerous. And no, it’s not the security issues or hallucinations, or the fact that the technology is expensive, it’s that the “promise of AI” is, for telcos, largely a trap. Few, if any, of the initiatives that are promoted for the telco community have any real chance of making a substantial difference to telco profits, and that’s what they need to be focusing on. AI is distracting them.| Andover Intel
Having spent last week on the network operator/telco space, it’s time to take a look at the enterprise side, and in particular the trends and developments in cloud computing and AI. Wall Street’s survey of CIOs shows that cloud spending growth slowed significantly so far this year, perhaps to a third of last year’s rate (which itself was slower than the year before). Enterprise comments (from 429 this year so far) confirm this, and also confirm that so far Microsoft seems to be leading ...| Andover Intel
The notion of AI agents is just the latest in the ongoing wash-with-AI process, but as usual there’s a grain of truth in all the nonsense. There are, to be sure, negative views on AI agents, but there are also some thoughtful pieces that, while they are likely victims of the normal survey bias problems, show a lot of enterprise interest. Some comments correspond to what enterprises tell me, but I have some different impressions of the space overall after my own chats.| Andover Intel
Networking is changing, and in every changing market the biggest pressure is applied to the vendors. You can’t sell the same old stuff when the buyer is moving on, and they surely are. There are some pressures that we could classify as systemic, meaning they don’t originate from a single thing but rather from gradual tectonic movements, and others that are reactive, meaning they come about from a single factor. We have both, and that will impact network buyers and, of course, vendors.| Andover Intel
The DoJ finally, after making a totally nonsensical objection to the HPE/Juniper deal, followed up with a somewhat compensating irrelevant settlement deal, leaving things just about where they’d been before the whole mess began. But, of course, where that might be in an overall market sense is still up in the air.| Andover Intel
Remember the old film “Play Misty for Me”? Well, Juniper may be revising it to “Play Mist for Sales”, at least to channel players. In a June CRN article, their head of partner programs says “Our Mist AI native networking platform—it’s that gateway into predictable as-a-service growth because that for me is the future and what customers are looking for, and our technology just plays so well into that.” They may be right.| Andover Intel