Red Hat brings generative AI to IT automation with Ansible Lightspeed

Red Hat is turning up the heat on automation at its annual Red Hat Summit in Boston this week with a major announcement: Ansible Lightspeed, a new AI-powered automation tool, is on the way.

🤖 What is Ansible Lightspeed?

Lightspeed is a generative AI-driven extension of Ansible, Red Hat’s open source IT automation platform. It aims to simplify complex DevOps tasks — like building and managing playbooks — using natural language input.

Rather than coding by hand, users can now describe their automation process, and Lightspeed will handle the rest — generating code, tools, and workflows automatically.

According to Thomas Anderson, VP & GM of the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat:

“We’re focused on Ansible automation — not just automation in general — using IBM’s foundational models trained specifically on Ansible’s language.”

🤝 Red Hat + IBM: A Smart AI Play

Lightspeed is a joint effort with IBM, using the Watson Code Assistant trained on Ansible playbooks, community knowledge, and expert-driven automation content.

This partnership taps into the $34B Red Hat acquisition by IBM in 2018 and delivers a specialized AI model, unlike the general-purpose ones from OpenAI or Google.

🛡️ Enterprise-Grade Features

What makes Lightspeed enterprise-ready?

• ✅ Workflow Transparency – It cites sources so engineers can verify before deployment

• ✅ Security-first design – Future versions will include enterprise safety controls

• ✅ Skills Bridge – Non-experts can start automating faster, reducing the learning curve

“Subject matter experts get more productive, and newcomers don’t need deep Ansible knowledge to get started.”

🧪 Release Timeline

• 🔄 Preview for open-source users: Later in 2025

• 🚀 Enterprise release: October 2025

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There’s also a new feature launching today:

⚡ Event-Driven Ansible Now Live

Red Hat also introduced Event-Driven Ansible — built for advanced DevOps and SRE workflows like Day 2 operations. This tool enables real-time event-based automation and is generally available today.

🧠 Why It Matters

As IT operations become more complex and talent shortages grow, tools like Ansible Lightspeed could be critical. With generative AI, Red Hat is helping both experts and newcomers be more efficient, secure, and confident in building automation workflows.

💡 Tip for Readers:Keep an eye on Ansible Lightspeed if you're working in DevOps, cloud automation, or infrastructure as code. It's shaping up to be one of the most practical AI implementations in enterprise IT.