Rami Rahim1:28
Good afternoon. Hello everyone. Welcome to HPE Discover Las Vegas. My very first Discover Las Vegas. Could not be more excited about being here.
So, I got a story for you. A few years ago in San Francisco, the Millennium Tower became home to one of the most famous engineering cautionary tales in modern construction history. This is a stunning 58-story luxury skyscraper in the heart of the city. Beautifully designed, technologically advanced, built to be truly iconic. But over time, something unexpected started to happen. The building began to sink and then it began to tilt. Not because the structure above ground was poorly designed, but because the foundation underneath wasn't built to handle the long-term realities of the environment around it. And as the demands on the building increased over time, the weakness underneath became impossible to ignore.
So right now, companies everywhere are racing to build intelligent applications, autonomous operations, real-time experiences, and entirely new business models powered by AI. But AI places enormous new demands on the infrastructure: massive data movement, constant inference, real-time responsiveness, explosive scale. And if the underlying foundation isn't designed for that new reality, eventually the strain starts to show up.
So to succeed in networking today, we have to think differently, because AI is changing everything. One of the clearest messages from this morning's keynote was simple: AI is reshaping every part of the enterprise. But none of that happens without the right foundation underneath it. And that foundation starts with the network. The network is no longer infrastructure sitting quietly in the background. It's become a strategic platform for how organizations operate, innovate, and scale. Why? Because the demands on it are exploding: more users, more devices, more applications, more data, and entirely new expectations for real-time experiences across every industry.
From digital payments, connected stadiums, healthcare, research, media, and AI-driven services, the network is what makes those experiences possible. That's why leading organizations are treating the network as core strategic infrastructure, not just to keep up, but to unlock what comes next.
Now, the ones that embrace this shift will be better positioned to innovate faster and to compete more effectively. The ones that don't will increasingly find themselves left behind.
But the good news is this: while AI is placing unprecedented demands on the network, AI is also becoming the answer to how the network adapts, scales, and withstands that pressure. Because the old model of networking — static, manual, reactive — simply cannot keep up with the speed and complexity AI introduces. What's required now is a network that can learn, a network that can predict, a network that can optimize and heal itself in real time.
In other words, the future of networking will not just support AI, it will run on AI.
Now, we see this in two really powerful ways: AI for networks and networks for AI. First, AI is changing how networks are operated. As environments become larger, more distributed, and more dynamic, manual operations are just not going to keep up anymore. That's where AI for networks becomes a true game-changer. The payoff is significant: better uptime, better user experiences, fewer tickets, faster remediation, and more time for IT teams to focus on strategic work instead of constantly troubleshooting.
And second, AI is redefining what the network itself must deliver. The reality is this: AI innovation can only move as fast as the network allows. You can have massive compute power and millions if not billions spent on GPUs, but if the network introduces latency and bottlenecks and instability, you're limiting performance, slowing down outcomes, and giving up ground to the competition.
That is why the network has become essential infrastructure for the AI era. And none of this works — none of it works effectively at least — unless security is built into the foundation itself, because the network is now both the connective fabric for the business and unfortunately increasingly one of the main pathways that attackers use to target it.
That means the network has to be a core part of the security strategy, with AI-driven anomaly detection, automated response, role-based access and enforcement, and a zero trust approach that helps protect users, applications, and data everywhere. And just as importantly, it has to deliver that protection without adding friction that slows users down or piles more complexity onto IT teams.
That is the real shift here: security and user experience can no longer be trade-offs.
Now, all of these point to a new era of IT, one where self-driving networks are no longer optional. They are essential, because AI-scale infrastructure cannot practically be operated manually. The networks of the future must be able to sense, to learn, to optimize, to protect, and heal themselves in real time.
And let me be clear about this: HPE has made more progress than any other company in these areas. We are bringing together AI-native hardware, software, silicon, security, and agentic AI ops into a closed-loop system that operates at speed and scale that humans alone simply cannot match.
The result is a network that delivers better performance, stronger resilience, simpler operations, and better user experiences. And that's what the self-driving network is really all about: moving IT teams from manually operating infrastructure to accelerating the business.
So today I want to explore what this next era of networking actually looks like and how secure AI-native self-driving networks are solving real problems for our customers. Some of these customers are going to be joining me on stage to share how their organizations are navigating real-world problems today. And you're going to be seeing demonstrations of how HPE Networking helps organizations overcome these problems and move at the speed of innovation with confidence, because the organizations that modernize their networks now with the right architecture and the right intelligence and the right operational model are going to be much better positioned for what comes next.
With that said, enough from me. Let's hear from the people out there building and operating these environments in the real world. So, please join me in welcoming my first guest, CIO of The Ohio State University, Rob.