The beer wasn't the only thing flowing in Munich last week. From June 8–12, 2026, the Westin Grand Munich was taken over by the network automation community as the Network Automation Forum hosted AutoCon 5.
I've been to a lot of industry conferences over the years. NANOG, Cisco Live, AWS re:Invent. You name it. But AutoCon has carved out a uniquely honest space in that landscape. Its tagline asks the uncomfortable question that has puzzled our industry for decades: "Why haven't we seen full adoption of network automation, yet?" No vendor CEO keynote. No pay-to-play keynotes. Just 700+ engineers sitting in a room together, willing to admit what isn't working and collaborate on how we make progress together.
Network Automation Forum does one conference a year in the United States and one in Europe. The city changes each time but the value to the attendees remains high. Network automation isn't a North American niche; it's a global discipline, and Munich was a fitting place to prove it.
The event kicked off Monday and Tuesday with two full days of pre-conference workshops. Sixteen workshops spanning everything from Python basics and Config management with Nornir and NAPALM, to advanced topics like building a chained Agentic AI system to cut MTTR and building a modern observability stack. The workshops required a separate ticket and several were sold out; a sign that practitioners showed up wanting to get their hands dirty, not just collect slide decks.
The main conference ran Wednesday through Friday, and the energy in the room was noticeably different from a typical vendor-driven event. When Michael Bushong from Nokia stepped up to deliver the opening keynote on "The Cognitive Biases Behind Automation's Failures and Future Successes," he set the tone immediately. The argument? Our industry has poured billions of dollars into automation tooling, and most networks remain largely un-automated. The problem isn't the technology. We all know the protocols work, the frameworks are mature. The problem is us. Loss aversion, survivorship bias, and misframed business cases have quietly killed more automation initiatives than any protocol gap ever did. It was a great way to open the conference, and his point was exactly right.
Wednesday afternoon featured a variety of practitioner-led sessions that reinforced Bushong's thesis from the ground up. DE-CIX's Lucas Immanuel Nickel walked through two production-ready delivery patterns his NetOps team ships via GitLab pipelines in under ten minutes. Sony PlayStation's Tim Sando made the case that ops-led automation shouldn't wait for a top-down program that rarely moves fast enough. Instead, start with one script, build trust, and grow from there. Deutsche Bahn's Leo Fleskes shared something that resonated: two years of data work had to happen before any automation was possible. A VPN rollout that used to take 70 minutes across four teams now takes 25 across one. That's the return on doing the unglamorous work first.
Thursday went deep on both the technical and organizational dimensions of automation. Swisscom's session on reaching fully automated backbone networks with 10,000 devices, SRv6, NSO, and zero manual intervention was the kind of talk that makes you simultaneously inspired and humbled. Eric Chou's session on navigating the LLM landscape for network engineers was a practical and much-needed map of an AI ecosystem that has gotten very crowded, very fast.
The NAF Framework Track running in parallel on Thursday was a highlight for anyone working on building durable, vendor-agnostic automation architectures. I was not able to attend these talks but I heard great feedback from those that did and I am looking forward to reviewing the videos once they are posted. Claudia de Luna's walk through the NAF Solution Wizard on a live use case was a reminder that the unglamorous work of reference architecture and shared vocabulary is what makes the community actually move forward together.
I had the privilege of presenting in the Leadership Track on Thursday afternoon with a talk titled "The ROI of Network Autonomy: Building the Business Case for Agentic Tool-Chaining." The Leadership Track ran in parallel with the general session, and I'll admit there's a certain pressure that comes with competing for attention against a room full of technical content. But I firmly believe that the only way network automation moves forward is if we, as engineers, learn to speak the language of our business. We have to learn to articulate the ROI of the systems we are building.
The core argument: automation in networking isn't a research project anymore, but the people writing the checks still aren't sure it's worth the investment. Tool-chaining, the practice of connecting LLM-driven agents to real operational tools like your Source of Truth, your monitoring stack, your ticketing system, is where the real ROI lives. Not in any single tool in isolation. But making that case to a VP or a CFO requires a different kind of fluency. It’s a sociotechnical that requires the organization to be ready for it.
I walked through how to frame the business case: what metrics actually matter, how to quantify the cost of man hours for humans doing the task manually, and how to present risk-adjusted returns from automation in a language that lands with decision-makers. The room was engaged and saw people taking pictures of the slides. I am looking forward to the survey results on how I can improve but if you want to discuss the business case further, find me on LinkedIn or Bluesky.
AutoCon 5 made something clear: the network automation community has grown up. The conversations in Munich were more grounded. It is clear that a lot of people are now doing network automation. AI for NetOps and autonomous networking is becoming more real, albeit with guardrails needed. The hallway track was buzzing all week with genuine peer-to-peer problem solving; not vendor pitches dressed up as thought leadership.
These are just a few of the many excellent talks delivered at AutoCon 5. If you missed it or want to learn more, the recordings will be worth your time. And AutoCon 6 is coming to Tucson, AZ November 16-20, block the time now. This is the conference our community has needed for a long time, and it keeps getting better.
Prost, Munich. See you next time.