Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced major innovations to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform designed to operationalize AI agents at enterprise scale. By establishing the trusted execution layer for IT operations in an agentic era, Red Hat provides an industrial-grade connection between AI intelligence and IT action.
Automation is the critical foundation for AI adoption. As organizations move from AI experimentation to production, they require a reliable way to connect model outputs to their existing infrastructure. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 and a new automation orchestrator (technology preview) are designed to deliver this connection, providing the policy-driven governance and precision needed to help make AI a driver of operational action.
What is new with Ansible Automation Platform?
The evolution of Ansible Automation Platform enables teams to orchestrate complex AI workflows by integrating human oversight and intelligent insights for more reliable, large-scale results. The latest enhancements unlock AI’s potential for the next generation of IT operations:
- Deploy context-aware AI: Generate more contextual AI responses with the automation intelligent assistant by injecting organization-specific information via “bring-your-own-knowledge” functionality.
- Establish a universal AI bridge: Simplify AI-driven automation using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Ansible Automation Platform to seamlessly connect AI tools and automation, without the need for custom integrations.
- Accelerate AIOps at scale: Use opinionated solution guides for ecosystem partners like IBM Instana, ServiceNow and Splunk to simplify AIOps implementation.
- Streamline automation consumption: Scale and consume automation more efficiently across teams through the automation portal’s simplified workflows for creating and packaging content.
- Drive data-informed decisions: View performance and ROI metrics directly in the automation dashboard to quantify automation’s impact across the enterprise.
- Introduce multi-mode orchestration: Connect deterministic, event-driven and AI-driven automation through the new automation orchestrator. This single workflow canvas uses shared data and advanced workflow logic to extend the platform’s capabilities for the agentic era.
Why This Matters
These innovations mark a significant evolution for Ansible Automation Platform, positioning it as the definitive automation platform for organizations operationalizing AI in IT operations. Organizations do not need to start over to adopt AI. Instead, they can harness their existing library of trusted playbooks as a governed foundation, allowing AI agents to investigate and recommend actions that are executed through human-approved, deterministic workflows.
Infrastructure teams are at the forefront of a shift toward high-density, agentic environments. According to IDC, “by 2027, 85% of the Global 500 organizations will deploy agentic AI for autonomous IT cloud operations to continuously monitor, analyze, and remediate issues at scale with minimal human intervention.” In this new landscape, AI agents are only as valuable as the systems that execute their intent. Ansible Automation Platform offers the speed and efficiency AI-driven IT operations require alongside the governance and precision production systems demand, empowering teams to adopt AI innovation on their own terms while seeking to maintain production stability.
What Red Hat and IDC are saying
“As AI rapidly shifts the scale and speed of ITOps, Red Hat delivers the governed automation foundation that turns intelligence into trusted action,” said Mr. Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager, Ansible, Red Hat. “Ansible Automation Platform serves as the control plane for task-based, event-driven and AI-driven, multi-step automation, allowing the focus to shift from deterministic automation to comprehensive outcome-based orchestration. By intelligently orchestrating when to use AI-driven reasoning versus proven deterministic automation, we help customers maximize efficiency and innovation while managing AI token and compute costs effectively.”
“The challenge for IT leaders isn’t just generating AI insights; it’s moving those pilot projects into production-ready workloads safely and cost-effectively,” said Mr. Jevin Jensen, research vice president, IDC. “An automation orchestrator acts as a critical bridge, providing a trusted execution layer that allows AI agents to interact with complex infrastructure through a single, governed workflow. This capability is essential for organizations looking to move beyond AI experimentation toward true autonomous operations.”
Key takeaways
- Bridge the observability and action gap: Use Ansible Automation Platform as a trusted execution layer for AIOps to turn monitoring insights into automated remediation across the technology stack.
- Extend existing investments: Move established automation workflows into the agentic era, using existing playbooks as foundational building blocks for long-term AI innovation.
- Implement seamless orchestration: Unify every mode of automation, including task-based, event-driven and AI-driven, into a single, visible workflow so teams no longer have to manually piece together tasks across different tools.
Deeper details
The latest enhancements to Ansible Automation Platform connect experimental AI to mission-critical operations:
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) server: Supports an agentic approach to managing and troubleshooting the automation environment. IT teams can inject organizational policies and technical best practices into the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, moving beyond generic model responses to provide results tailored to the specific environment.
- Enhanced automation portal: Provides a centralized experience to scale self-service automation across the enterprise. A new visual execution environment builder and content catalog help teams develop and package automation faster while maintaining oversight of the internal software supply chain.
- Advanced access management: The platform now serves as an OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication provider for HashiCorp Vault (available separately), supporting automation in zero trust IT environments. By issuing short-lived, job-specific tokens for each task, this integration removes the need for static service accounts and mitigates the risk of credential sprawl across the automation lifecycle.
- Automation orchestrator: A new, dedicated capability in technology preview that enables teams to design and manage complex workflows with shared data and unified governance. This orchestrator enables multi-mode automation, allowing teams to combine deterministic, event-driven and AI-driven automation within a single workflow canvas, empowering teams to use the right mode to solve the right problem.
Availability
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 will be available in the coming weeks. The automation orchestrator will be available later this year.
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