You’re Not Behind. You’re Stuck

ONUG AI Networking Summit, Frisco, Texas · May 2026

I gave a ten-minute talk at ONUG in Frisco last week on the Agentic NetOps Adoption Model, and I want to describe the setup, because “I spoke at a conference” does not capture it.

A ten-minute talk on an open show floor

Picture the floor as a rectangle. Along one long wall are four speaking areas, each with its own TV and color scheme, green, red, blue, yellow, a podium and about thirty chairs facing it. A couple feet away the booths begin, and other parts of the floor open into a keynote stage and a five-chair panel. Our own booth, elsewhere in that grid, was too small for three people to stand at once. The talk was not there. It was at one of the four areas on the wall. ONUG calls these Triple T sessions. Ten minutes, no room to hide.

Here is what I love about that format. The thirty seats were filled with people who chose to sit and listen for ten minutes. They wear headphones to cut out the clutter of every other conversation on the floor and hear me directly. Plenty of others were walking the aisle a few feet away. I spoke loud enough that even without headphones you could follow along as I moved through the slides. It is half presentation, half street performance.

The Agentic NetOps Adoption Model

I have given a lot of talks. This one was different, not because of the setup, but because of what I was putting on that TV for the first time in front of people who were not NetBrain employees.

The talk was called “You’re Not Behind. You’re Stuck.” The argument is simple. Most teams have monitoring. Many have automation. Some have been running AI pilots for over a year. And yet when an incident fires, the response still looks a lot like it did five years ago. The problem is not the technology. It is that most teams are stalled at a predictable point in how they operate and have no name for where they are. Without a name, moving forward is guesswork.

That framework is the Agentic NetOps Adoption Model. The first version I came up with had five stages of growth. I took it to our leadership team, we worked it over together, and it came out the other side as four non-linear levels: Aware, Enabled, Proactive, Autonomous. Not a ladder and not buckets. They are lanes you can enter from wherever you already are. Between them sit three plateaus that quietly stall progress. The point I keep coming back to: AI is not the goal. AI is the lever. Once you know where your team actually stands, AI becomes the thing that moves you forward.

I have walked through this enough times to know where it lands, so I spent the ten minutes watching the room instead of my slides.

Presenting to the front row

Here is the part I will remember. Bernadette Nixon, our CEO, was in one of those thirty chairs, front and center. So was David Mann, who ran NetBrain as a customer four times over before he joined us as VP of Global Services. Our VP of Solution Marketing was there along with Chance Mendiola (Sr. Mgr. Global Business Development) and Eugene Oile (Pre-sales SE) from our team, and even Wilson Haney our RVP of Central. That is a lot of weight in folding chairs for a ten-minute floor slot.

I will be honest about what that felt like. You build something on a whiteboard, then in a deck, and for a long time it only lives in your own head and a few conversations. Putting it in front of an external audience is the moment it stops being yours and becomes a thing other people can pick up, argue with, or use. Doing that with your CEO a few feet away sharpens the nerves and the focus at the same time. I wanted the people in the chairs to feel what I felt about it.

They did. The reactions afterward told me the framing landed. Not “here is another maturity chart,” but “I know exactly which plateau my team is stuck on.” When someone can locate themselves on your map, the map is doing its job.

A good idea travels without you

Here is what makes me think this one has legs.

In a few weeks, one of our German SEs is taking this same content to AutoCon 5 in Munich. Also a ten-minute slot at another great event. This time, on real stage, a real room, somewhere around 650 people. More than twenty times the thirty chairs I had in Frisco. And I will not be there.

He saw the material, decided it was worth carrying, and is running with it. That is the part I am still getting used to about building a framework. If the idea is right, it starts to travel on its own. It goes further than you can personally take it, into rooms you will never stand in, in front of people you will never meet. The best thing you can do is build it well enough that it survives the handoff.

So I am proud of the Frisco talk. A wall, a TV, thirty chairs, ten minutes, and the CEO sitting in one of them. But the part I keep thinking about is Munich, a few weeks out, where I will not even be in the room. You’re not behind. You’re stuck. And once a good idea gets unstuck, it moves faster than you do.

Team Pics Below!