AAP will now also support more models, in addition to IBM’s WatsonX Code Assistant. Supported models include those from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and any other leading models that are OpenAI API-compatible, says Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager of the Ansible business unit at Red Hat. Enterprise will also be able to provide their own background information, in the form of RAG embedding, to AAP.
“Customers have a lot of contextual knowledge,” Balakrishnan tells Network World. “These are our policies, this is when we update machines — they have rules they have written about IT infrastructure. We can now start reading all of those things.”
But the new AI functionality will operate within tight guardrails, he says. “AI is unpredictable,” he adds. “When you suddenly put AI into your production environment and ask it to change it, you’ve seen the articles about how a company lost its database.”
Instead, the AI will rely on pre-made, tested, approved playbooks for creating the automations that users request, he says. “And if AI does something new, then you need to put a human in the loop,” he tells Network World. “They have to verify that those actions that AI recommends are the right actions.”
