From CLI to GPT: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Network Automation - John Capobianco

From CLI to GPT: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Network Automation

From the command line to generative AI, this talk traces my personal and professional evolution through three eras of network automation—AI 1.0 (REST APIs), AI 1.5 (RAG with network documentation), and AI 2.0 (autonomous agents with MCP). I’ll share how a kid who once worked on a factory floor became a network engineer, then a Senior Network Architect at the Parliament of Canada who embraced automation as early as 2014. That journey led to writing Automate Your Network in 2019, joining Cisco to train the next generation of engineers, co-authoring the pyATS book, and now helping lead the charge into AI-driven operations at Selector AI. Along the way I built real, working systems—from tools that generate configs from images to AI agents that troubleshoot live infrastructure—and learned what it means to push boundaries in public.

But this talk isn’t just about technology—it’s about conviction. When I started fusing AI with network automation, the skepticism was fierce. Many dismissed it as hype; others told me it couldn’t work. Yet persistence turned those experiments into industry shifts: ideas like pyATS, MCP, and AI agents are now part of Cisco certifications and production networks worldwide. I’ll share what it took to keep building through doubt, the lessons learned about resilience and reinvention, and why I believe we’re living through the greatest transformation of network engineering since the CLI itself.

#networkautomation #artificialintelligence #aiagents #mcp