The shift from AI experimentation to real-world agentic operations is forcing a reckoning with how enterprises manage the gap between AI-generated insights and reliable production systems. By 2027, 85% of the Global 500 will deploy agentic AI for autonomous IT operations. However, most organizations still lack the critical execution infrastructure to govern what those agents actually do, according to Sathish Balakrishnan (pictured), vice president and general manager of Ansible at Red Hat.

“Automation is mission-critical,” Balakrishnan said. “Automation is the foundation of AI and IT operations. People are realizing AI is unlocking a lot of possibilities, AI ops is unlocking a lot of possibilities, but AI is probabilistic. You don’t want AI agents mucking up your production servers, ever.”

Balakrishnan spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Red Hat Summit 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform serves as the trusted execution layer for agentic AI in IT operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Ansible as the trusted execution layer for agentic AI

The agentic era is sharpening a longstanding tension in enterprise IT: AI can find answers fast, but production systems demand precision. Burning expensive tokens and GPU cycles to patch servers that already have known, established solutions wastes budget and introduces dangerous variability across infrastructure at scale, according to Balakrishnan.

“If you know how to patch a server, do you want to ask the AI, ‘Burn your very expensive tokens, burn your very expensive GPU to patch a server, which you already know how to do, and there’s only one way to do it?'” Balakrishnan said. “Why would you ask AI to find 10 different ways to do the same thing and burn your GPU cost? The cost of creating code is zero, but the complexity it creates … means there’s so much more in your operations that you have to manage. You have to manage more with less. How do you do that? You do that only with automation.”

Red Hat’s answer is a new automation orchestrator introduced in Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 that unifies three modes of automation — task-based deterministic, event-driven and AI-driven — in a single governance plane. The release also makes Ansible’s Model Context Protocol server generally available, allowing any AI tool of choice to call into Ansible playbooks, and Cisco Systems Inc. is now reselling the Ansible Automation Platform — a validation, Balakrishnan noted, that Ansible has become the de facto standard for network automation.

“You want to make sure agents can only do things within their domain of knowledge,” he said. “The only time you’re going to be using AI in IT operations is when you find a new problem that you haven’t discovered before. Because once you identify a problem, you should resolve it and put it into your deterministic catalog of actions.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit 2026 event:

(* Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE