Welcome & Introduction, Intel Presentation
Chris Smith, Vice President, North America Public Sector

Intention does not equal impact
Adam Irving, Director, Civilian Agencies, Red Hat

Ask any IT leader about their top challenge, and you’ll likely hear: “We need to do more with less.” But while the intention is clear, the path to meaningful, sustainable change often isn't. In this keynote, Adam Irving, Director at Red Hat for civilian agencies, offers a deep, practical exploration of why so many leaders struggle to deliver greater results with fewer resources.

Drawing from years of experience supporting large IT organizations, Adam will unpack the hidden obstacles and share actionable strategies to drive efficiency, boost FTE ROI, and reduce operational toil. This session is tailored for technology executives, innovation leaders, and anyone aiming to increase impact without increasing headcount.

Don’t miss this chance to gain practical insights you can apply immediately to improve your organization’s performance.

Doing More with Less - Automation and AI to the rescue
David Bertin, Director, Ansible Business Unit

David Bertin, Global Ansible Platform Leader, will discuss maximizing the impact of automation and leveraging AI for the next generation of IT operations.

In this session we’ll explore how features and strategies available with Red Hat Ansible today can make a huge impact on your organization: reducing downtime, lowering risk, strengthening your security posture, optimizing costs and increasing your capacity for innovation.

Predictive Automation: Using Predictive Analytics, RPA, and Ansible to Amplify Ops
Jake Groth, Technology Vice President, Chief Technology Office, General Dynamics Information Technology

Modern IT teams are inundated with alerts, logs, and metrics—yet amid the noise lie patterns that can predict what’s about to break. While teams use Ansible for patching, they often don’t use it in fixing issues during an outage, or getting ahead of a potential outage. Predictive automation bridges the gap between detection and response by transforming analytics into action. In this session, we’ll explore how to use predictive engines and historical data to forecast operational issues, then route those insights through RPA bots for context gathering and decision support and finally into Ansible Automation Platform for targeted remediation. This layered approach empowers teams to scale operations, reduce downtime, and shift from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building predictive workflows that deliver impact before incidents escalate.

Overcoming IT Automation Adoption Challenges – A Partner’s Perspective
Moderator: Brock Spradling, Senior Director, North America Public Sector, Red Hat

While mature IT organizations often embrace an "Automate First" philosophy—seeking to automate all tasks unless they absolutely can't—many others remain stuck in fragmented, siloed automation efforts. IT leaders recognize the need to "do more with less," yet frequently face roadblocks when trying to scale automation across their teams. In this panel discussion, our trusted partners will share insights from the field, exploring the common challenges that hinder widespread IT automation adoption. Drawing on real-world experience, they’ll highlight strategies and best practices that help organizations evolve their automation maturity and drive transformative results.

Turning intent into impact: crossing the chasm between manual and automated network operations
Tony Dubiel, Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Ansible

A successful automation strategy demands a strong commitment to automation-first workflows. However, in real-world network operations, it remains essential for network engineers to retain direct access to troubleshoot and reconfigure devices through the out-of-band CLI. In this session, we will explore how to establish a centralized source of truth for network configurations and use policy enforcement to manage configuration drift. This approach enables teams to advance toward an infrastructure-as-code model without sacrificing the flexibility to perform rapid, manual changes when necessary.

In this session we will see a brief demo of how this methodology could be applied to network devices using the AnsibleAutomation Platform.

"No More Tickets, Just Triggers: Turbocharging ServiceNow with Ansible Magic"
Raed Soliman, Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Ansible

Tired of babysitting change requests and incidents? This session dives into how the Ansible Automation Platform transforms ITSM in ServiceNow through smart, scalable automation. Learn how to streamline tasks like change management and incident response, all while using the ServiceNow CMDB as your source of truth.

We’ll also explore Event-Driven Ansible, which brings real-time automation to life—automatically reacting to ServiceNow events like problem creation or catalog requests. Walk away with practical strategies, real-world use cases, and a new vision for a hands-off, high-speed ITSM workflow.

Lab 1: Introspection and Planning (Day-0)
You are new to automating and would like to leverage AAP to gather information around various infrastructure (“safe” read-only activities). Let’s leverage automation to find out more about what we have in order to gain insights into what can and should be done next!

Lab 2: Standardizing Deployments with Workflows (Day-1)
Let’s proceed with deploying and verifying a new application to production. We’ll create a workflow that reuses existing templates that have been provided already by the different teams to build out their production environments.

Lab 3: Enhancing Operational Efficiencies (Day-2)
Once you have successfully deployed a production environment, we want to ensure we can leverage the business benefits by introducing better methods of automating and using Event-Driven Ansible to safeguard mission critical components such as your delivery network or application.

Best Practices around Ansible Playbook Development
Christopher Hammer, Senior Specialist Adoption Architect - Ansible

In this interactive session, you will see an end-to-end developer journey. Everything will be covered from setting up a repeatable developer environment to testing and code promotion best practices. At the end of the session, we will share the code snippets so you can kickstart your implementation of an end-to-end developer journey in your organization.

NEW FEATURE: Policy as Code
Joon Paik, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, Ansible

How do you enforce best practices? How can you prevent the use of automation against certain environments? How can you restrict the usage of imperative automation? How can you enforce that passwordless authentication is used?

The new policy as code feature will allow you to do all of these things and more. After a short presentation of this new feature, you will get a look at what policy as code looks like in action and helps you build a more secure and structured automation platform.

AAP Architectures for large financial industries - Roundtable
Chad Ferman, Senior Principal Product Manager - Ansible

Financial institutions run automation at scale and have specific regulatory requirements. Red Hat now offers validated architectures for AAP. Our client architecture team will also share unique insights and approaches around high availability and implementation models for automation at scale.