How AI Data Can Use Network Telemetry Without Sacrificing Reliability & Control w/ John Capobianco

AI agents are moving from experiments into production network operations. John Capobianco, Head of AI & Developer Relations at Itential, joins Molly Presley to explain how enterprises can use network telemetry, automation, and natural-language agents without sacrificing reliability or control.

They cover predictive maintenance, GPU-cluster networking, data retention, private models, MCP, RAG, deterministic workflows, and governance. John also explains how read-only agents can improve ticket enrichment, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and source-of-truth creation today.

For enterprise IT leaders, network engineers, AI infrastructure teams, cloud operators, and data strategists, this episode shows what agentic operations can do now and what to prepare for next.

What network task would you trust an agent to handle first? Comment below and subscribe for more conversations about enterprise data and infrastructure.

0:00 Data Unchained and today’s guest 1:17 John Capobianco’s network automation journey 2:54 VibeOps and AI for network engineers 5:00 How Itential puts agents into production 7:00 Turning network telemetry into answers 12:23 Predicting failures before outages 14:52 Why GPU clusters depend on the network 16:54 Retaining data to train better models 18:51 Agents as the new infrastructure interface 23:06 Does data need to be clean before AI? 27:55 Security, secrets, and operational guardrails 34:13 Why MCP and open standards matter 38:03 Why enterprise RAG is still relevant 42:36 Building an AI governance board 44:58 Where to follow John

@Itential

Join VibeOps: https://vibeopsforum.com/join/ John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-capobianco-644a1515/ John on YouTube: @johncapobianco2527 John on X: https://x.com/John_Capobianco Itential: https://www.itential.com/ Hammerspace: https://hammerspace.com/ Suggest a future guest: [molly@hammerspace.com](mailto:molly@hammerspace.com)

#AgenticAI #NetworkAutomation #EnterpriseAI #AIOps #DataInfrastructure