I went into NFD40 thinking the AI networking pitches were going to be the marketing layer dressed up in new vocabulary, and I came out convinced it’s a different design problem.
“We haven’t announced any products yet.
Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.
Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.
Alex Saroyan had about ninety seconds onstage before he made the architectural claim that the rest of the AI-networking conversation has been ducking.
Thomas Scheibe walked on stage and said the quiet part out loud.
Halfway through Tom Emmons’ scale-out segment at NFD40, a fellow delegate looked at Arista’s load-balancing slide and said what most of us were thinking… this could have any vendor’s logo on it.
Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them.
Anyone who has managed carrier circuits for a living knows the pain. Quoting takes forever. Installs drag on with zero visibility.
I’ve been building networks for nearly thirty years. I understand leaf-spine fabrics, BGP design, VRF isolation, ECMP, and congestion management.
I’m Heading to Networking Field Day 40 I’m excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a delegate for Networking Field Day 40, taking place April 8–10, 2026 in Silicon Valley.