HPE's networking boss: AI will kill human-run trouble tickets in 2 years

HPE's networking chief, Rami Rahim, has a timeline that should make every IT operations team sit up: within two to three years, AI will handle essentially all network trouble tickets without a human in the loop. Rahim, the former Juniper Networks CEO who now runs HPE's networking business as president and general manager, told The Register during a visit to Australia that the industry is already most of the way there. "I think we're now at probably around 70 to 80 percent of all tickets don't require human intervention," he said. "Within two to three years, we'll have no issues that require humans." The one exception, he concedes, is physical hardware swaps - but even that, he argues, should not require a skilled network administrator. The technology should, without your knowledge, order a new part. "It comes in the mail and you don't need an IT person, just an intern can come and take this thing, attach it to where the failed device is, and everything else just happens automatically." That is the vision HPE calls "self-driving networks," an AIOps approach that combines AI-assisted monitoring with automated remediation across HPE's hybrid cloud portfolio. The stakes for network teams are existential: if Rahim's forecast holds, the day-to-day job of triaging tickets - the classic entry point for countless IT careers - largely disappears. The question is whether operators will trust a machine with their careers. The Register pressed Rahim on exactly that point, noting that following bad advice from an AI is unlikely to help anyone's career prospects. His answer leaned on the history of automation adoption: self-driving taxis have become widely accepted in the Bay Area, and first-time riders draw on their past experience with automatic transmissions, cruise control, lane assist, and self-driving features. Each successive experience of automation working safely, he suggested, imparts confidence to try new forms of automation. "And so what we do is we give the operators the ability to turn on actions, automated actions, feature by feature, and capability by capability," he said. Simple jobs like allowing AI to reboot a switch port are a fine place to start. The metrics he uses to measure success are the number of tickets lodged about poor Wi-Fi performance and the speed with which they are fixed. "I think if you look at the number one trouble ticket that is filed in a typical enterprise environment, it is 'the Wi-Fi sucks.'" Regardless of the actual problem - an application going down, a WAN issue, a cloud provider issue - the experience is first felt through Wi-Fi, and therefore it's as simple as "The Wi-Fi sucks." Rahim thinks AI will figure out why Wi-Fi isn't at its best quicker than a human can, and use agents to fix it faster. Those agents, he suggested, make automation even more important because they represent a new class of users that are dependent on networks. "We're quickly approaching a realm in which every enterprise has way more agents working than humans working, and they need a reliable network connection to do their work," he said. Organizations can't scale their human teams to a size at which they solve problems fast enough to manage all those connections. And because agents make so much traffic, buyers will need to add more networking hardware, which will further scale networks to a size no human can hope to manage alone. Only AI, Rahim believes, will make it possible to use AI. Of course, Rahim has skin in this game. HPE closed its acquisition of Juniper in July 2025, and he claims HPE's networking portfolio and AI capabilities are second to none. He told The Register the integration is going swimmingly, pointing to the fact that HPE continues to sell Wi-Fi access points that started life as Aruba and Juniper products - but users can now drive them with management tools from either vendor. He proudly noted that became possible within 18 months of the acquisition closing, then made a sharp reference to certain other vendors taking far longer to achieve the same thing. The Register mentioned Cisco and Meraki; Rahim didn't show any signs of disagreement. Asked about HPE CEO Antonio Neri's statement on the company's last earnings call that "we are at the core becoming a networking company," Rahim emphasized networking's importance across workloads. "When you look at the AI datacenter, it's become as much a networking problem as it is a compute problem. So I just believe that networking is becoming more important in general for the industry, and it's certainly becoming more important for HPE as a company," he said. That is why HPE is now bringing the self-driving network tech that started life at Juniper to the rest of its portfolio. "We've already, for example, integrated our network fabric management capabilities with OpsRamp, which is the observability software for the hybrid cloud stack," Rahim said. "So that would be an example of something that's now done. But more and more pieces will come along the way." For CIOs and network leaders, the strategic implication is clear: the competitive battleground is shifting from human expertise to AI-driven automation, and the vendors that win will be those that can prove their AI can be trusted with the mundane but critical work of keeping networks alive. The window to build that trust - and to reskill human teams for the exceptions AI can't handle - is roughly two to three years, by Rahim's own clock.