Virtually Speaking Podcast

What happens when traditional enterprise automation meets agentic AI?

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome Sean Roberts to Virtually Speaking to explore how Automic Automation, an advanced service for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), is helping enterprises orchestrate complex business workloads while preparing for the next generation of AI-driven automation.

From financial services and manufacturing to enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle, organizations rely on automation platforms to execute millions of critical jobs with reliability, scalability, and auditability.

But as enterprises begin introducing AI agents into these environments, new challenges emerge around governance, observability, explainability, and cost control.

Sean explains how Automic Automation provides the foundation for a hybrid approach, combining deterministic workflows with emerging agentic AI capabilities through an intelligent control plane.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Enterprise Workload Orchestration: How Automic Automation manages hundreds of millions of job executions across complex enterprise environments.
* Scalability and Reliability: Supporting tens of thousands of agents, high-throughput execution, failover, and 24/7 operations.
* Deterministic vs. Agentic AI: Why predictable, auditable automation remains essential as organizations adopt AI-driven workflows.
* Intelligent Control Planes: Bringing governance, orchestration, and control to hybrid automation environments.
* Observability and Explainability: Tracking workflow execution, AI decisions, token consumption, and operational performance.
* Private AI and VMware Cloud Foundation: Why data sovereignty, on-premises inference, and AI factories are becoming increasingly important.
* AI Economics and ROI: How enterprises can introduce agentic AI incrementally while maintaining control over cost and business outcomes.

Discover how Automic Automation and VMware Cloud Foundation can work together to provide a scalable, secure foundation for enterprise automation and AI.