Unwrapping AI and Network Automation at The Network Buzz
A December episode of Laketec's Network Buzz with Mike Trappe and Phil Wightman: HPE Aruba Networking's new Central, what we brought back from AutoCon, how to make the business case for automation, where AI lowers the barrier, and Christmas ales.
17 December 2025 · 1 min read
The Network Buzz, the Laketec podcast. Published 17 December 2025. Host: Mike Trappe, with Phil Wightman and me.
My second and last Network Buzz, recorded in the holiday spirit, which on this show means the first five minutes are about Christmas ales. Mike had Phil Wightman and me on together, so it is the wireless and NAC engineer and the CTO talking through the same year from two angles.
What we covered
The first technical block was HPE Aruba Networking's new Central, the cloud management platform we had been deploying and what changes about day-to-day operations when it lands. Then AutoCon, the Network Automation Forum conference I had just come back from: why network automation adoption still lags what the tooling can do, the mix of attendees and vendors in the room, and the automation journeys Intel and H-E-B presented, which are the kind of stories that make the rest of us feel behind and then motivated. From there we tried to define what a network automation framework actually consists of and how to make the business case for one, which is the question I get more often than any technical one.
The last third was AI: how it lowers the barrier to automation for engineers who never wanted to be programmers, the caution and security concerns that go with handing a model access to anything, and the everyday ways all three of us were already using it. If you listened to the September episode, this is the practical follow-up, with a colleague who was in the field deploying the stuff.
