Raghuram Malpe Pai

Title of the Talk: The Self-Driving Network Is a Myth (For Now): Why Autonomy Is Earned, Not Engineered

Abstract:
Autonomous” and “self-driving” have become the default adjectives for the next generation of networks and communication infrastructure. The marketing has run well ahead of the reality, and the gap is not mainly about smarter models. In this keynote, Raghuram Pai makes an honest case: true operational autonomy is gated by trust, and trust is earned incrementally through evidence, reversibility, and auditability. Drawing on nearly two decades architecting mission-critical network software and AIOps platforms, he separates the hype from the achievable, explains why the hardest problems in autonomy are governance problems rather than modeling ones, and presents autonomy as a staged spectrum instead of a switch to flip. The talk lays out the preconditions a system must meet to legitimately earn more authority over time, offers a realistic assessment of where autonomy is real today versus aspirational, and leaves the audience with a practical mental model for building intelligent networks that can act, safely, without asking for a leap of faith.

Bio

Raghuram Pai is a Principal Engineer and Senior Architect at HPE Networking (formerly Juniper Networks), with more than 19 years building mission-critical networking, streaming telemetry and cloud-native platforms across the US, India, and China. He is a prolific inventor with multiple patents spanning edge telemetry, adaptive metric collection, device-aware sensing, and AI-driven fault detection, and the architect of systems ranging from streaming telemetry pipelines to a software platform behind over $1B in annual recurring revenue. Today he architects trustworthy, agentic AIOps for network automation. He is a recipient of the highest individual technical honors at both HPE/Juniper and Huawei.