Strategic Imperatives for Infrastructure Leaders in an AI-Enabled World by William Collins

William Collins, Director of Technical Evangelism at Itential, shared a pragmatic take on adopting AI + MCP in network operations—from the reality of status-quo bias and “firefighting” cultures to how standards like MCP enable plug-and-play, multi-vendor ecosystems. He contrasted the pre-MCP world of brittle, point-to-point integrations and committee-driven RFPs with a post-MCP model of modular tools, natural-language interfaces, shared context, and faster pilots. He also outlined Itential’s role: a governed orchestration platform that normalizes inputs across CLIs/APIs, enforces guardrails and auditability, and exposes vetted actions via an MCP server—pairing well with Selector’s insights to automate real workflows. Bottom line: there are no shortcuts—start small, earn trust (human-in/ on-the-loop), then scale toward agentic NetOps.

What You’ll Learn:
Why adoption stalls: Status-quo bias, overworked teams, slow RFPs, brittle custom integrations—and how MCP changes the equation.
MCP’s value prop: Standards → plug-and-play tools, NL interfaces, composable designs, and easier vendor swaps/pilots.
Trust ladder to autonomy: Human-in-the-loop → on-the-loop → selective autonomy, with guardrails, governance, and measurable wins.
Itential × Selector pattern: Selector supplies context/insights; Itential executes safely across systems via MCP and policy controls.

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