Rather than wholesale AI adoption or rejection, Baumann advocated for thoughtful application: understand the technology, identify appropriate use cases, implement with realistic expectations, and validate results.

Network automation without proper security creates systematized vulnerabilities—insecure practices get codified and replicated across infrastructure. Howard's work demonstrates that secure automation isn't significantly harder than insecure automation; it just requires different initial choices and proper tooling.

Dorlandt's presentation showcased the evolution from reactive (screen scraping) to proactive (push-based) network monitoring. BMP represents a fundamental shift in how we gather BGP intelligence—from resource-intensive polling to efficient, real-time data streams.

For organizations deploying large-scale wireless infrastructure—hotels, campuses, public venues—this approach offers dramatic cost savings while maintaining enterprise functionality. The key insight: automation doesn't just improve existing operations; it can enable entirely new economic models.

Saul's presentation addressed a practical challenge many organizations face: leveraging open networking benefits while managing vendor implementation differences. SONiC offers genuine multi-vendor consistency, but abstraction layers become essential for operational simplicity.

Garros's presentation addresses automation's adoption challenge from a refreshingly honest perspective. Technical capability isn't enough; automation must inspire confidence in its users. This requires deliberate design choices that prioritize user trust alongside functional correctness.

Edelman's keynote captured the network automation community at an inflection point. The foundational work is done—tools exist, communities are established, and early adopters have demonstrated value. But mass adoption remains elusive. The challenge isn't technical anymore. It's cultural, organizational, and educational. How do we help more organizations and individuals navigate the journey from CLI-centric operations to automation-enabled efficiency?

Querol's design-driven approach addresses a fundamental automation challenge: the gap between what network architects envision and what gets implemented. By codifying design logic and protecting design-driven data, organizations can ensure that automation implementations match architectural intent.

As network automation tools proliferate, the risk grows of creating more complexity rather than less. Rautanen's approach suggests that successful automation requires thinking beyond tool integration toward service modeling and abstraction design.

Antich's semantic correlation approach suggests a path toward systems that can reason about network events without explicit programming for every scenario. Whether this specific approach succeeds or not, the principles—autonomous interpretation, graph-based reasoning, semantic understanding—likely represent necessary capabilities for future network operations.

NetBrain's approach suggests that operational automation requires different tools and thinking than deployment automation—focusing on service visibility, proactive monitoring, and institutional knowledge capture rather than just configuration management.