Let Go, Now Build: Networking’s Great Re-Platforming – Main Stage Keynote
In May, this community left Dallas with a dare: let go of decades of rigid, human-scale architecture and embrace controlled autonomy — AI agents in the fabric, governed by humans at the boundaries. Six months later the dare has become a deadline. This keynote opens the Summit in three movements.
Nick Lippis puts the six months on the record: what actually changed, what this community’s own pre-event data says about where you really stand — 84% now running or testing agents in network and security operations, 12% with a network purpose-built for it, two thirds unable to say their non-human identities are inventoried and governed — and why the AI fabric is not a network with security bolted on top, but a single tight weave of networking and security in which every crossing is a control point.
Dave Temkin, Managing Director and Global Head of Networks at JPMorgan Chase, then joins him on stage. No slides. A working conversation about doing this at the scale of one of the world’s largest financial institutions: what he has built, what he has stopped doing, where the network is the binding constraint and where it isn’t — and the specific recommendations he would give this room before it locks 2027 budgets.
Peter Campbell, ONUG Fellow and lead of the Agentic AI Working Groups, closes it with a live demonstration: one control plane across every domain, and an agent meeting a gate it cannot talk its way past. The path doesn’t go away. It gets enforced.
That is the frame for both days — 50 threats the control plane has to mitigate, 25 requirements this community wrote and published, and 55 suppliers in this hall who have been asked to answer them. One path shown. Now show us yours.
WHY THIS SESSION MATTERS
Spring proved the community is ready to let go. Fall is where the people accountable for the answer — CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and the network architects of the world’s largest enterprises — see it done once, then compare blueprints before locking 2027 budgets. Miss this room and you rebuild alone.
Nick Lippis is an authority on corporate computer networking. He has designed some for the largest computer networks in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on network strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation including Hughes Aerospace, Barclays Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Eastman Kodak Company, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Liberty Mutual, Schering-Plough, Sprint, WorldCom, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and a wide range of other equipment suppliers and service providers.
Mr. Lippis is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe computer networking industry trends and developments.
I focus on what I see as the next frontier of cybersecurity: securing autonomous AI agents and
systems.
I lead ONUG’s Agentic AI Working Groups, where I work alongside industry peers to define the
security standards and guardrails that autonomous AI systems will need as they take on greater
operational autonomy. This work sits at the intersection of emerging risk and practical enterprise
defense, shaping how organizations think about trust, control, accountability and safety in
agentic AI.
I was named an ONUG Fellow in recognition of my contributions to enterprise security, notably
as the creator of the Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF).
Prior to focusing entirely on cybersecurity research, I was a security executive at Cigna, where I
led teams responsible for cloud and AI security strategy and execution.
My work in digital forensics complements this focus, grounding the guardrails I help define in the
technical realities of how systems actually fail and how incidents actually unfold.
I’m always glad to connect with fellow researchers, practitioners, and industry groups working on
the security challenges of autonomous systems and digital forensics.
