At the end of June, I was invited to speak at the workshop organized by Asociația Interlan at Hotel Delta Jupiter, on the coast near Mangalia — a gathering of the community of internet and broadband operators behind the InterLAN-IX exchange.
My session was about how AI agents can be put to work in the day-to-day of a network operator — not as a novelty, but as something that quietly takes routine load off people. The important shift is from a chatbot that only answers questions to an agent that can actually do things: hold the first line of customer conversations, triage and enrich network alerts before a human ever looks at them, and automate the repetitive back-office steps that eat an operator's day. The point I kept coming back to is that an agent is only as useful as the systems and context you connect it to — give it access to your data and clear boundaries, and it becomes a capable colleague; leave it floating with no context, and it's just a demo.
"An AI agent isn't magic — it's a brain you plug into your own systems. The value isn't the model; it's the context and the access you give it, and the boring, repetitive work you let it take off your team's plate."
The rest of the agenda
Around my talk, the workshop covered the ground this community cares about: the takeaways from ANGA COM 2026, new equipment and technologies for broadband networks, and a look at applications built inside the community itself — tools like OLT Manager and Self Managed TVX. It's the kind of practical, hands-on program you only get when the people in the room actually run the networks they're talking about.
And, as always at these meetings, the real value was in the conversations between sessions — each operator arriving with their own challenges from the field and the solutions that actually worked. Thanks to Asociația Interlan for having me, and to everyone who put the program together. Happy to come back and go deeper on putting AI agents into production for network operators.