Most network teams I talk to share the same frustration: scripts never scale.

A clever bit of Python lives on someone’s laptop, but getting it into production – governed, reusable, and consumable by others – feels like climbing a mountain. Tickets pile up, approvals slow everything down, and the promise of automation gets stuck in limbo.

Now, AI is rewriting that story.

When I sat down for this demo, I didn’t start with weeks of coding. I started with a prompt.

“Parse Cisco IOS interface data with Python and Netmiko.”

In minutes, the AI not only produced the script but also scaffolded the supporting files – requirements.txt and a service spec – that I’d normally handcraft myself. That’s hours of work collapsed into seconds.

But code on its own isn’t enough. The question is: how do we operationalize it?

This Month’s Spotlight

This is where process and platform matter. By committing the AI-generated assets into Git (or scripts you already have), the CI/CD pipeline automatically packaged the code and deployed it into Itential Automation Gateway. The dependencies installed (IAG does that on its own….). The service registered. Governance applied.

Suddenly, that AI-generated script wasn’t just “my script.” It was a service the whole organization could see, consume, and trust.

Next, I dropped the new service into a workflow on the Itential Platform. With a few clicks, I could test it against a device, query the results, and dynamically display the output.

Workflows do more than chain tasks together – they bring in governance, RBAC, SSO, change management, integrations like ServiceNow or Slack. The scaffolding that turns fragile scripts into durable automations.

The final step was publishing the workflow as both a self-service form in Operations Manager and an API endpoint.

That’s the game-changer. App teams don’t need to wait on me; they can run the automation themselves through a clean UI or programmatically through APIs. And because everything runs through Itential, it inherits compliance, security, and auditability by default.

The demo might focus on parsing IOS interfaces, but the principle scales across the stack:

• AI accelerates code creation.
• Git enforces structure and compliance.
• Itential productizes automation with governance and self-service.

That’s the pattern. And it’s how we close the gap between idea and execution – without sacrificing speed or control.