Sathish Balakrishnan, Ansible | Red Hat Summit 2026

In this interview from Red Hat Summit 2026, Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager of Ansible at Red Hat, joins theCUBE's Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight to discuss how Ansible is evolving as the trusted execution layer for agentic AI in enterprise IT operations. Balakrishnan outlines three modes of automation — task-based, event-driven and AI-driven — and explains why each serves a distinct role in managing modern infrastructure. He makes the case that AI agents must never access infrastructure directly, and that Ansible's decade of proven playbooks, role-based access control and credential management provide the essential guardrails for autonomous operations.

The conversation also explores the newest capabilities in the Ansible 2.7 release, including support for any OpenAI API-compatible LLM for playbook generation and the general availability of the Ansible MCP Server, which allows any AI tool to call into Ansible directly. Balakrishnan details the new Edge Manager offering, designed to handle fleet management of edge devices and bring AI capabilities to distributed environments — a market signal reinforced by Cisco's decision to resell Ansible Automation Platform. He also introduces the automation orchestrator, a unified canvas combining all three automation modes, integrating with observability tools like Splunk, Dynatrace and IBM Instana and writing full audit trails into ServiceNow. From building working prototypes in three hours to automating cloud marketplace private offers end-to-end, Balakrishnan offers a clear roadmap for how enterprises can manage growing IT complexity without growing headcount.

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00:00 - Intro
00:06 - Evolution and Impact of Automation
02:09 - Event-Driven Automation
04:53 - Building the Future: Automation and Cloud Integration
08:00 - Ansible's Edge Capabilities
10:56 - AI, Automation, and Access Management
13:15 - Red Hat's Internal Use and Future Vision

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Видео Sathish Balakrishnan, Ansible | Red Hat Summit 2026 канала SiliconANGLE theCUBE