Enterprise AI infrastructure in 2026: A reality check | Kelsey Hightower & Dan Ciruli

After two years of hype, many enterprises feel they’ve overspent on AI infrastructure without realizing the promised value. In this live session, Luca Galante, Managing Director & Senior Analyst at Weave Intelligence, sits down with Kelsey Hightower, former Distinguished Engineer at Google, and Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager, Cloud Native at Nutanix, to unpack why AI is just another workload, how to secure agents, and what it all means for platform engineers. In most cases, it is often less about training models from scratch and more about how platform engineering teams can fold AI inference and fine-tuning directly into their existing infrastructure. Explore the State of AI in Platform Engineering report and the agentic platform tooling landscape discussed in this session: https://platformengineering.org/reports 0:00 Why the model isn't what makes AI succeed 4:21 AI is just another workload 8:13 Where most enterprises really are with AI 12:12 Should you train your own model? 15:32 What platform teams are actually missing 17:00 Your legacy stack isn't going away 18:26 Mapping the agentic platform stack 22:44 Agents, malware and scoped identity 25:16 A periodic table for agent infrastructure 26:42 How Nutanix approaches agentic platforms 30:25 Private inference and AI gateways 31:27 The chaos facing enterprises and vendors 34:57 Why the platform engineer's role won't change 38:58 Q&A: new capability or added complexity? 42:25 Q&A: reviewing AI code without rubber-stamping 44:22 Q&A: balancing experimentation and reliability 45:55 Q&A: stopping shadow agents 49:01 Why platform engineers shouldn't be afraid Ready to go deeper? 🚀 Get your copy of the book, Thinking in Platforms, and learn how to build the kind of well-designed platform that makes AI just another workload: https://weaveintelligence.io/thinking-in-platforms-book Community Slack channel: https://platformengineering.org/slack-rd Follow us on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-org And don't stop there! Continue your platform engineering journey with Platform Engineering University, where you'll build the skills to secure, scale and run agentic workloads with confidence: https://university.platformengineering.org/ #PlatformEngineering #AIAgents #CloudNative