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.

Harper's story illustrates how network automation can become a powerful security tool even when that wasn't the original intent. The lesson? Sometimes the best security improvements come not from security-focused projects, but from operational excellence initiatives that inherently improve risk posture.

For organizations considering Terraform for network automation, Pozo's epic provides a realistic roadmap: expect challenges, plan for scale, build teams, and focus on the indirect business value that makes the journey worthwhile. Sometimes the hardest journeys yield the most valuable destinations.

Gluware's presentation reflects a maturing understanding of enterprise automation challenges. Rather than promoting tool replacement, they're advocating for integration and enhancement of existing automation investments.

What makes Temporal compelling for network automation isn't just technical capabilities—it's the recognition that complex network operations are inherently distributed systems problems.

This presentation demonstrates that automation doesn't have to conform to popular tool limitations. When requirements exceed tool capabilities, the solution isn't necessarily to reduce requirements—it might be to find better tools.