4 takeaways from Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2025

Now that the dust has settled from Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2025, let’s discuss some key takeaways and exciting innovations that can help improve your organization's automation practice and boost IT efficiency. We recognize there are many challenges enterprises face within IT every day, but we are focused on helping you solve these challenges while preparing for AI. Follow along to hear our 4 takeaways from Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2025 and how our customers are solving current issues and minimizing their risks with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

1. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform + HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise are better together 

A major highlight of the event was the deep dive into the synergy between Red Hat and HashiCorp. With IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp, Red Hat is pursuing a shared vision of enabling hybrid infrastructure. HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar joined us to emphasize that this is about collaboration: Terraform excels at Day 0 infrastructure provisioning, while Ansible Automation Platform takes the lead in Day 1 configuration and Day 2 operations. Together, they deliver end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle management, simplifying even the most complex environments.

2. Enterprises are innovating through automation 

We heard from industry leaders who are fundamentally transforming their IT operations with Ansible Automation Platform:

• Ensono: accelerating innovation and efficiency Ensono, a leading technology advisor and managed service provider, showcased how Ansible Automation Platform helps them unify IT management and foster innovation. By adopting the platform, Ensono achieved massive scale, deploying over 30,000 IT assets and resources, executing 40 million tasks and running 225,000 jobs in just 1 year. They saved over 210,000 hours by automating repetitive tasks, allowing their IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Automation analytics provided crucial insights, enabling proactive issue resolution and informed prioritization of future projects.
   
• Barclays: finding "Project Joy" in automation strategy Barclays tackled widespread fragmented automation and technical debt head-on with "Project Joy." This enterprise-wide initiative empowered individual teams to own their automation, starting small and scaling impact by focusing on value stream mapping to demonstrate ROI. By embracing a platform engineering approach with Ansible Automation Platform, Barclays has truly revolutionized their operations.
   
• Google: automating virtualization at hyperscale Google Cloud is leaning on automation with Ansible Automation Platform to provision and manage bare-metal infrastructure for mission-critical, high performance computing at scale. Taking advantage of our APIs and webhooks for multiplatform orchestration, they are meeting the “virtualization moment” and helping their customers efficiently migrate their workloads to more modern infrastructure.   
   
• SWIFT: securing global finance with mission-critical automation For SWIFT, handling approximately US$300 billion in daily financial transactions means a zero-risk approach to failure is paramount. Their "blast radius" automation strategy, built on Ansible Automation Platform, enables identical environments across development, staging and production through Configuration as Code (CaC). Combined with just-in-time credentials and robust role-based access control (RBAC) per application and region, SWIFT maintains a security-first posture and consistent compliance across their global operations. Their story is a powerful reminder of how automation underpins the resilience of critical financial infrastructure. Automation and AI are the defining tools within an efficient and effective IT landscape. Five key areas are discussed to foster transformation that businesses will need to stay ahead. The critical link between AI endeavors and IT automation is being further solidified while improving the support customers receive from Red Hat team members. All of this is part of the continuous improvement to Ansible Automation Platform that Red Hat strives to deliver to customers. 

These stories underscore how organizations navigate their unique automation journeys.

3. Automation and AI can bring more value to your IT operations

We recently published 3 new AI use cases to guide you as you start to explore practical ways to bring AI to your automation today: 

1. Standardize AI infrastructure and operations: Apply consistent, automated practices to AI environments, streamlining deployment, usage and scaling for greater efficiency. This enables AI infrastructure to be provisioned and managed with consistency and repeatability.
2. Enable AIOps: Integrate automation workflows to proactively address manual operations, errors and performance issues. This includes using Event-Driven Ansible to turn observability data and intelligence into action, providing automated remediation and reducing manual toil.
3. Enforce policies for AI-driven automation: Make sure that AI-driven automation adheres to security, business and compliance rules. This involves a policy enforcement approach to validate automation against configured policies and allows for human decision-making when necessary, providing safeguards around AI solutions for better outcomes and control.

4. Ansible Automation Platform has become even more intuitive and robust 

Our Q2 2025 Summit release brings exciting new features to Ansible Automation Platform:

• The evolution of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant (Technology Preview): Initially launched in 2023 with IBM watsonx Code Assistant to boost productivity in creating Ansible content, Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed has evolved into an intelligent assistant embedded directly into the Ansible Automation Platform UI. This intuitive chat interface provides direct access to documentation for faster troubleshooting and onboarding. It offers contextual support for day-to-day automation management, responding to prompts about execution environments, user access, error messages and Event-Driven Ansible configuration.
   
• Automation dashboard (early adopter program): This new, in-product dashboard will prove the value of automation investments. It helps measure the business impact, time and cost savings of automated IT operations, providing a clear ROI for leadership—all from an on-premise, disconnected utility.
   
• Policy enforcement: This feature supports governance and compliance by integrating external policies at automation execution time. It uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) to restrict automation jobs and validate them against configured policies, providing control and predictability, especially crucial as AI adoption accelerates and regulatory demands grow.
   
• New and updated content collections: We've continued to expand our vast library of Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated content for automating across domains like AI infrastructure, virtualization, cloud and networking, making it easier than ever to get started and scale automation.

These innovations, alongside continued enhancements to Cloud Marketplace offerings and the overall user experience enhancements, are designed to accelerate automation adoption, minimize operational risk and improve ease of use across the enterprise.

At Red Hat, we believe the future belongs to the automators. Join us on this journey to automate mission-critical workflows with confidence, transforming your IT operations into a strategic advantage. See you in Atlanta at Red Had Summit and AnsibleFest 2026. 

Related resources

• Full AnsibleFest keynote: AnsibleFest 2025 Keynote - Driving transformative change in the AI Era
• Blog: Automate everything, adapt to anything: Red Hat's vision for the next era of IT operations
• Webinar: What’s new in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Webinar: Maximize your automation impact with the latest release of Ansible Automation Platform