AI was a hot topic as expected at Cisco Live, but the need for a new operational strategy is emerging. I had a chance to chat with John Mymryk about his thoughts on using the lessons learned from the Cloud Computing days to apply operationalization (a word I apparently cannot say correctly) to AI usage. From token usage to model selection, John details how operations is the new strategy for AI.

Transcript

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Hey everybody, we’re out here at Cisco Live and I ran into John from Microsoft over here and hey everyone, >> we’ve been talking a lot about well at the conference a lot about AI and everybody has an agent now and you have a Gentic AI but what are some of these thoughts that you’ve been sharing? >> Well in my opinion a lot of the things that revolve around uh new technology that we’re adopting um operations is starting to become the new strategy. So in other words, think when the uh the cloud happened, people thought it was awesome. You could just spin up VMs and it was great until it came time to pay the bill. Then you really needed to operationalize your cloud because people left virtual machines on and then had to pay this massive bill in the end. They realized I needed to start shutting down my VMs. But then they realized some of their applications and platforms that they designed for it cached the data and didn’t save it. So when they shut the VMs down, they lost data and so there that required a whole new thinking about the operations of backup, recovery, resiliency, high availability, etc. The same applies into this whole agentic world we’re in now. It’s a great technology, but if it’s not operationally controlled right, you will run into the same problems that you had in adopting cloud and leaving your VMs on and paying a huge price for that. >> Yeah. So, we’re seeing a lot of these agents doing some deep thinking and more long running processes and people are seeing the bills. They’re seeing that tokens come in. So, that’s a lot of a parallel to what you’re seeing. Is that right? >> How many how many uh virtual reality cat videos do we need? And I know everyone loves the creativity aspect of it, but it has to be bridled in some way. And that just feeds into the operational controls that people have to put into place. So there’s a lot of technologies out there to do it, but it really comes down to a lot of common sense and basic operational control. And I think that’s where a lot of people need to look at and that’s why I think operations is the new strategy is a great moniker going forward in this uh AI world. >> I like that operation is the new strategy. Now, when you’re out there talking to customers or just using AI yourself, what are some tips or what are you’re seeing at this oper oper >> it’s a hard word oper now you got me not saying it right >> operationalization. >> Yeah, operate operationalization. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, I think that also speaks to the fact that you want to make sure you design um how you’re going to host an AI. Um because people should have choice whether it’s going to be chat GPT or it’s going to be Microsoft AI or it’s going to be uh claude. Um people should have a choice and it should be fit for purpose. Um, for instance, I mean, you you can you can uh run chat GPT to optimize databases, but actually claude’s a better way to do it and a much more uh a much cheaper way to do it where you can spend a couple hundred and somehow manage to optimize a aging SQL server uh to be 97% more efficient. So, there’s a lot of great use cases like that that people need to start looking into. Um, but then again, that’s a great application of small amount of money for a huge gain as opposed to just creating another cat video or something creative. And that is going to be where workloads like that in AI need to be prioritized and that needs to be something that is uh uh highlighted across the enterprise that that’s what you should be using AI for. Um, and I think that’s, you know, that just feeds into more about making that op that SQL server a lot more operationally efficient and that’s the new strategy. >> Yeah. So, a lot of parallels just everything that old is new again. >> Oh, yeah. I’ve seen it all. >> All right. Well, I appreciate your time today. Thank you. Great to see you again.