HPE's networking boss says AI will handle all trouble tickets without humans in two years

HPE is extending its AI-powered networking automation across its hybrid cloud portfolio.

That news came from Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks and now president and general manager of HPE's networking business, whom The Register met last week when he visited Australia.

Rahim champions what HPE calls "self-driving networks" – AI-assisted monitoring and automated remediation, part of the broader field known as AIOps.

The networking boss thinks AIOps will mean human network administrators soon won't need to work on any trouble tickets.

"I think we're now at probably around 70 to 80 percent of all tickets don't require human intervention," Rahim said.

"Within two to three years, we'll have no issues that require humans." He allows that hardware swaps will be the exception to that rule, but even for that job he thinks skilled network administrators shouldn't be involved.

"The technology should, without your knowledge, order a new part.

It comes in the mail and you don't need an IT person, just an intern can come and take this thing, attach it to where the failed device is, and everything else just happens automatically." Why you'll trust your career to a machine The Register asked why net admins should trust AIOps, given that following bad advice issued by a machine is unlikely to improve anyone's career prospects.

Rahim responded by pointing out that self-driving taxis have quickly become widely accepted in the Bay Area, and that first-time riders draw on their past experience of adopting cars with automatic transmissions, then cars with cruise control, lane assist, and self-driving capabilities.

Each successive experience of automation working safely, he suggested, imparts confidence to try new forms of automation.

"And so what we do is we give the operators the ability to turn on actions, automated actions, feature by feature, and capability by capability," he said.

Simple jobs like allowing AI to reboot a port on a switch is a fine place to start, he suggested.

The metrics he uses to measure the success of automation are the number of tickets lodged about poor Wi-Fi performance and the speed with which they are fixed.

"I think if you look at the number one trouble ticket that is filed in a typical enterprise environment, it is 'the Wi-Fi sucks.'" "Regardless of what the actual problem is – it could be an application going down, or a WAN issue, or a cloud provider issue – the experience is first felt through Wi-Fi and therefore it's as simple as 'The Wi-Fi sucks.'" Rahim thinks AI will figure out why Wi-Fi isn't at its best quicker than a human can do the job and also use agents to fix it faster.