AI continues to reshape technology and business; yet for the network, enterprise connectivity in the AI age means being always-on, and extra vigilant for sovereignty and security besides.
This means that speed is not the only requirement. As Julian Skeels, chief digital officer at Expereo notes, it is more about ‘certainty.’ “AI workloads are distributed, they’re continuous, they’re incredibly latency-sensitive. Inference, monitoring, retrieval and remediation never stop, so that changes the network’s role,” says Skeels.
“In the world of AI, networking actually becomes a system dependency,” he adds. “When the network degrades, the application degrades immediately.
“An AI-ready network needs to make data movement deterministic. It’s not just about it being fast; it’s about it being predictable, and observable, and governable, and resilient – and to do all those things under continual change.”
Many CIOs, however, are struggling right now with what Skeels describes as ‘connectivity everywhere but visibility nowhere.’
“They’re dealing with hybrid networks, multiple clouds, multiple providers and portals that create a constant operational drag to their teams,” says Skeels. “What they want is clarity and control – not more tools.”
Skeels arrived at Expereo last year with myriad cross-industry experience in product and digital transformation initiatives under his belt. He found an industry ripe for accelerative change, and a company determined to lead the way and ensure pricing global connectivity should take minutes rather than weeks.
“When I came to Expereo, I saw that global connectivity has, I would say, largely resisted real digital transformation for a long time,” notes Skeels. “Most customers will still experience it as slow, and manual, and opaque, and fragmented across the dozens of providers and portals they need to work with.
“We believe, though, that with emerging technologies such as agentic AI, that’s finally changing,” adds Skeels. “Our ambition here is to make global connectivity as simple, and immediate, and transparent as cloud computing is for our customers.”
Enabling such change for customers requires that mix of speed and visibility – and this is where the expereoOne platform comes in, to provide what the company calls ‘visibility at the speed of life’ and give customers a single, global view of what is being deployed, how it is performing, and what it costs. Beyond visibility, customers also need proactivity, as Skeels explains. “We’re deeply integrated into our customers’ order management, their ITSM, their ERP systems, which makes working with Expereo at scale absolutely seamless,” he says.
“The key point is that better visibility isn’t about more dashboards. It’s about connecting network behaviour to their business outcomes in terms of resilience, security experience, and cost.”
Skeels is speaking at the Digital Transformation Expo Global on February 4-5 around designing the AI-ready network – and his session promises to subvert the usual advice for those in attendance. “I want to challenge a few things,” notes Skeels. “I want to ask people to consider even unlearning things they’ve learned in the past.
“A lot of what we’ve taken for granted about networks no longer holds in an AI world.”
Watch the full conversation between Julian Skeels and TechEx’s James Bourne below:
Photo by Pixabay
