Riding the AI Revolution

Riding the AI Revolution

How starting at NETSCSOUT provided me with a lens of AI-powered NetOps and SecOps

On a recent family road trip, I was very upset when my favorite mobile game, Clash Royale, kept lagging. "There are service degradations in this spot," I thought to myself. A few days later, I received a scam message telling me I had unpaid tolls, and to click the link the scammer sent. This was clearly a bad actor trying to bypass the firewall, I decided.

Five months ago, I never would have thought like this. That is because I didn't know the first thing about networking or cybersecurity, let alone NETSCOUT.

For the entirety of my junior year of college, my peers and I were pitching ourselves to hundreds of companies, arguing that we were the best candidates for their internship roles. The reality is, beginning your career in this pervasive artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is terrifying, whether it is due to AI screening your resume for an interview, or news that tech companies are adopting agentic AI models and therefore leaning out their workforce.

In a world that is leveraging AI to be more efficient, accurate, and cost effective, what room does that leave for new college grads looking for work?

I wrestled with this question as I applied for internship roles and finally landed an internship at NETSCOUT, assisting with project management, marketing, and business development in strategic alliances. Right before completing my communications and applied statistics double major, I truly believed that I was well equipped for the position I was embarking on.

In Clash Royale terms, I was putting up 5x Barbarians and Spear Goblins against a Mega Minion. In normal terms, I was way in over my head.

Luckily, with a good manager, supportive intern cohort, and friendly NETSCOUT veterans taking my coffee chats, I absorbed an influx of information during my onboarding and throughout my internship. I defined numerous perplexing terms and acronyms that unveiled the functions of observability and security platforms, I researched our partners' corporate initiatives until I uncovered synergies with our product lines, and I learned our deliverable tracker like the back of my hand, so nothing slipped through the cracks.

And admittedly, I used some ChatGPT here and there. I learned how to prompt it to understand our partners' strategies in driving growth by parsing through 10-K forms. I used it to help visualize federated architectures for possible integrations. Sometimes, I even asked it to edit an email to sound more concise and professional. There is no doubt that AI streamlines operations, helping get work done faster and better.

I used to feel hopeless and afraid that I would lose the battle to AI in the workforce-that I would become so dependent on AI that one day it wouldn't need me anymore. But the truth is, AI needs companies such as NETSCOUT.

NETSCOUT sits in the path of digital traffic across enterprises, telecoms, and cloud providers. By capturing and performing deep packet inspection on the raw network packets, logs, and telemetry, NETSCOUT fuels the source data that AI/machine learning (ML) systems analyze for their insights. NETSCOUT enables real-time AI by feeding AIOps with second-by-second, low-latency metadata, empowering the detection and response of cyberattacks and service degradations.

I was completely oblivious to how this process kept me protected against leaking my sensitive data and allowed me to play Clash Royale for hours with no lags, and to the hidden keystone role that NETSCOUT plays to make this process as effective as possible.

There is more to AI than helping you come up with an impressive email or bullet points for a slide deck. It can truly support your workflow operations while also securing and improving your digital interactions, all day long.

So instead of asking what AI can do for me, fearing that it will do it instead of me, NETSCOUT has given me the opportunity to think about what I can do to help AI. In a digitized, data-driven, AI-led world, working for NETSCOUT has offered me a lens into what shaping the AI revolution looks like.

Learn more about NETSCOUT position in the networking ecosystem on our partner page.