Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IT leadership best practices fail when organizations focus on tools instead of people. In this episode of SolarWinds TechPod, hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring speak with Jon Collins, Field CTO and VP of Engagement at GigaOm, about what truly drives success in IT leadership—people, culture, and principles. This expert discussion breaks down why frameworks like Agile, ITIL, DevOps, and AI-driven operations succeed or fail based on leadership behaviors, prioritization, and trust—not technology alone.

AI is changing network operations (NetOps) from static automation into adaptive, data-driven systems that can summarize incidents, retrieve knowledge, and guide remediation with human oversight. In this talk, Phil Gervasi breaks down what “AI for NetOps” really means in practice, including the difference between classical ML and large language models (LLMs), why data pipelines matter more than model tuning, and how patterns like RAG (retrieval augmented generation), text-to-SQL, and agentic workflows turn raw telemetry into decisions.