AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins

What happens when your “coworker” can generate code and changes faster than your team can review them, and production still has to stay up?William Collins breaks down what AI-Native Ops looks like when you take reliability seriously: where reasoning should stop, where deterministic automation should begin, and how guardrails like compliance checks, version pinning, and controlled workflows keep AI from turning into outage fuel. Cory and William also dig into why context windows and tool sprawl matter in real systems, how protocols like MCP and agent-to-agent communication are shaping day-to-day automation, and why regulated environments can’t adopt new tech with hype-driven shortcuts.If you’re a platform engineer trying to balance speed with safety, this conversation offers a practical way to use AI for the work that drags teams down, without giving up operational discipline.Guest: William Collins, Director of Technical Evangelism at Itential, AWS community builder, and the co-host of the Cloud Gambit podcastWilliam Collins is a strategic thinker and catalyst for innovation. Over his career, he has helped enterprises build large-scale networks, driven modernization through cloud adoption, and excels at optimizing complex environments through good design practices and automation. Today, William works as Director of Technical Evangelism for Itential, where he focuses on evangelizing the Itential Platform, fostering strong relationships with customers to fully realize their goals, engaging with community, and advocating for the successful future of network, security, and automation infrastructure.As a content creator, William hosts The Cloud Gambit Podcast with Eyvonne Sharp, a show that unravels the state of cloud computing, markets, strategy, and emerging trends with industry experts. He is also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor (Automation, Cloud, and Network Engineering Content), AWS Community Builder (Network & Content Delivery), and is a group organizer for the USNUA - Kentucky User Group (KYNUG).Prior to Itential, William worked as a Principal Cloud Architect and Director of Technical Evangelism for Alkira where he helped grow the company from lean beginnings to being ranked 25th Fastest-Growing Company in North America and 6th in the Bay Area on the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. He also held various senior technical roles across the enterprise space in Financial Services and Healthcare, most recently at Humana as Director of Cloud Architecture. Outside of tech, his time is spent with family, woodworking, ice hockey, and guitar.Opinions expressed are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer.William Collins, BlogWilliam Collins, YouTubeWilliam Collins, X William Collins, Instagram William Collins, TikTokWilliam Collins, GitHubItential“The Cloud Gambit” podcastLinks to interesting things from this episode:Ghostty“Harness design for long-running application development” by Anthropic