With a preview of the latest version for Ansible Automation Platform in September, much of the discussion by Red Hat Inc. executives has been focused on taking automation everywhere and making it easier to do so.

The key learning from this recent dialogue is that automation is no longer relegated to the list of basic enterprise tasks, but it has become an area for innovation and exploration on a much wider scale.

“Automation is quite fashionable these days,” said Joe Fitzgerald (pictured, center), vice president and general manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. “It’s always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, but it was always perceived as an efficiency, a task level thing that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, a board room imperative.”

Fitzgerald spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AnsibleFest 2021. He was joined during the interview by Red Hat’s Thomas Anderson (pictured, left), VP of product management, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Alessandro Perilli (pictured, right), senior director of automation strategy. They discussed how the growth of automation is reshaping company culture, use of AI-powered tools to write code, and a future where the IT infrastructure will self-heal. (* Disclosure below.)

Automation shifts left

In one gauge of automation’s adoption in the enterprise, a study released by Deloitte in the end of last year found that the number of organizations deploying automation at scale had tripled over the course of only two years. This is changing not just the operational framework of many businesses, but the culture as well.

“Our customers are talking about culture in the environment itself, a culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has on an organization,” Anderson said. “Automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to IT subsystems and resources into the hands of people who traditionally haven’t had direct access to those resources.”

Automation’s organizational impact is also transforming how code is written. The AI research firm OpenAI, with funding from Microsoft, has developed a machine learning tool that translates English language into executable code commands. The project – named Codex – is in its early stage, but it has already shown an ability to build simple websites or games.

“What if AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable of translating what they want to achieve in a way that is automatable?” Perilli asked. “You need to express what you want to achieve in a way that the automation engine understands. Going forward, we’ll start to see AI being applied to this problem in a way that’s very similar to what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing with Codex.”

Red Hat’s work with Ansible has provided it with a better understanding of what enterprise customer needs may be looking forward, and the future may well be event driven.

“We’re getting a glimpse of that with what we’re doing with customers right now who are working on concepts like self-healing infrastructure,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s typing event systems and AI, which is looking at what’s going on in an environment and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much. I think that sort of event-driven automation is going to be huge.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during AnsibleFest 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE