Workshops Presented by Solutional
10:00 am – Aligning AI Initiatives with Your Business Goals with Phil Gervasi
This workshop will lay the groundwork for a successful AI initiative by aligning goals, assessing readiness, and defining measurable outcomes. You will learn:
● How to identify a meaningful AI initiative for your organization ● Aligning business objectives to an AI initiative
● Identifying practical AI use-cases for your business ● Understanding your data situation ● Measuring AI performance with technical KPIs
● Measuring AI effectiveness for business outcomes ● Resource and staff considerations for an AI initiative ● Security concerns in AI (technical and business)
● Building realistic timelines
12:00 – Agentic AI in Network Operations: Harnessing AI Agents, MCP Servers, and the A2A Protocol with Phil Gervasi
In this workshop we will talk about understanding how agentic AI transforms network operations through vertical (MCP) and horizontal (A2A) integration:
● Why agentic AI matters for NetOps – digging into the horizontal (A2A) + vertical (MCP) stack, ● LLMs vs. traditional ML and working with NetOps datasets (SNMP, flow, logs, etc) ● Planner, memory, tool-calling sub-agents, and prompt engineering vs. policy code ● Intro to MCP, endpoints, auth model, using MCP servers for NetOps tools (JunOS, Itential, Prometheus, etc), security risks and mitigations (OAuth 2.1, network hardening, etc) ● Intro to A2A protocol, capability discovery, conversation flows, auth tokens, relationship to MCP (peer vs. tool)
2:00 – Modern NetOps Needs More from Network Engineers – Becoming a Next Gen Network Engineer (NGNE) with Scott Robohn
This workshop lays out the rationale for acquiring the correct tech ecosystem skills needed well beyond vendor certifications and develop Next Generation Network Engineers. It presents a layered approach in the form of a curriculum with 100-400 level courses, along with electives and and
fast-developing areas.
The workshop content is built on decades of experience in Networking and NetOps, ongoing interviews conducted via the Total Network Operations podcast, and other interview and survey instruments–all with the goal of helping individuals grow their skillsets to align with today’s AIOps and software-centric environment
