From Firefighting to Self-Healing: Building Trust in Agentic NetOps

Network teams have spent years running infrastructure around a few gurus and a lot of cutting and pasting. Bernadette Nixon, CEO of NetBrain, says that model no longer cuts it.

Nick Lippis sits down with Bernadette, who took the helm at NetBrain in January after serving as CEO of Algolia and Alfresco, with earlier experience in network management and IT infrastructure at the United Nations.

She explains why the digital twin alone is no longer enough and how the NetOps harness brings together live network context, network intents, and automation tools to keep AI agents on the rails. She also shares how a large financial services company ran NetBrain’s deep diagnosis agent against every networking trouble ticket in ServiceNow, automatically closing 25% without human intervention and providing engineers with root cause analysis and suggested remediation for the rest.

Nick and Bernadette explore the path from self-healing to self-optimizing to autonomous networks, why the LLM isn’t the star of the show, and why the question for network teams has shifted from “Can we do it safely?” to “Where do we start?”

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