Sovereign AI: Guide for IT Networks
How to Adopt Agents Without Losing Control — Lessons and Best Practices from a 25-Year IT Veteran Behind Selector AI, Cisco, and the Parliament of Canada
Every network team is being asked to move faster on AI — without putting a single byte of sensitive data at risk. For teams in Switzerland, the EU, and any regulated industry, that's the daily reality. Vendors are racing. Security has veto power. And the gap between a lab demo and a production deployment has never been wider.
In this webinar, we'll talk to John Capobianco — an expert with 25 years of IT experience applying automation and AI in highly regulated, mission-critical environments, from Selector AI and Cisco to the Parliament of Canada. He's now Head of AI & Developer Relations at Itential and one of the most recognizable voices at the intersection of network engineering and applied AI.
What we'll cover
Build vs. buy: custom MCP servers and platforms like OpenClaw, or vendor-provided automation — and which one wins, when.
The vendor gap: why only 1 of 56 infrastructure-relevant MCPs comes from an official vendor release.
The path from lab to production in regulated environments: the realistic route through security review, change control, and company policy — without losing the speed that made agents interesting in the first place.
Local AI vs. public LLM: how to frame the trade-off for a leadership team, and who actually owns that decision.
Case study: how Acer built Sofia, a sovereign AI platform serving 2,500 employees inside their own Azure tenant.
The human side: why AI adoption is an HR problem, not a tech problem.
The career plan: a 90-day roadmap for network engineers who want to be the ones using AI, not the ones replaced by it.
About the speakers:
Ovidiu Dociu — Acer EMEA Network Manager, hosting the conversation from inside a Swiss corporate network where data sovereignty isn't a preference — it's the law.
Emanuele Meazzo — Acer EMEA AI & Data Engineering Senior Manager and a key driver of AI initiatives inside Acer. Architect of Sofia, Acer's hybrid AI platform now serving 2,500 employees.
John Capobianco — Head of AI & Developer Relations at Itential. With a 25-year career in IT, he has held senior roles at Selector AI (Head of Developer Relations, focusing on AI-driven observability and autonomous network operations), Cisco (AI Technical Leader), and the Parliament of Canada / House of Commons (Senior Network Architect).