Mike Huot on AI, Data Access, and the Unique Challenges of Networking – Delegate Dialogues
Mike Huot, IT Infrastructure Advisor and a new delegate at Networking Field Day, shares his experience engaging in open, wide-ranging conversations with peers across the industry. He reflects on the recurring challenges in networking that persist despite constant technological change and highlights how AI—especially large language models—is starting to unlock better access to valuable data. Mike points out that while networking may seem simple and uniform from the outside, every network is uniquely designed to fit its environment, revealing a level of complexity that’s often overlooked.
Transcript
So I'm Mike Hewitt. Uh, it infrastructure advisor, helping folks, uh, manage up their business needs, their marry up their bus business needs, the infrastructure that they had. I, I think that the conversations that we've had, you know, that's been my favorite part of the network field day experience so far.
We've been able to have a lot of wide ranging conversations. Uh, and it's interesting to hear how common experiences are going across this industry right now as we continue to, uh, evolve and some of the stuff changes, but a lot of it stays the same. We seem to see, see a lot of the same problems, and we're finding new solutions to those problems.
I think the Avis Networks was an interesting thing to see how, you know, with, with what they did kind of blew my mind and seeing just how quickly we're, we're seeing ai, um, using LLM to get at the data sources that we have. I've often thought about, you know, that one of the problems we have is we have a lot of data, but we don't have a good way of getting at it. And I see this as kind of the groundwork for us to kind of democratize the data that we have so that others can get at it, that aren't experts in the field.
And this is kind of a good first step. One of the things I wish more people knew about networking is that, as ubiquitous as it is, it's, it's not all done the same way. So it, it feels like it's just a service that's just like a light switch that I turn on.
But every, every network seems to be unique. Each seems to be different. It's not like, oh, I run a wire from here to here to here.
There's a lot of different pieces and parts of the, to the network that are more or less bespoke to that environment.
