Mike Vizard talks with Patrick Quirk, president and general manager of Opengear, about why distributed IT environments, edge deployments, cloud platforms and AI workloads are increasing the pressure on lean IT teams. Quirk explains how AI and automation can help close the skills gap, but only if organizations apply governance, access controls and human oversight to prevent agentic systems from making mistakes at scale. The conversation also examines midmarket IT challenges, network operations, cybersecurity convergence, intent-based automation and why resilient design requires intent, visibility and control.