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Talk track — Automation Orchestrator

Rehearse from this. Present from run-sheet.md.

Everything a live run would put on screen is embedded below, so the whole track works with no cluster.

Who is in the room

You are the pre-sales engineer. Every document in this folder is written to you.

They are platform engineers and automation leads — people who already run AAP and are evaluating what Automation Orchestrator adds to their stack. They have built workflows in AAP's controller. They have opinions about approval gates, and most of those opinions were formed by watching a Slack-based process fail silently at 2 AM.

They do not care about They care intensely about
Another product to install Whether this changes how they work day to day
Marketing claims about "agentic" Whether their existing templates survive the transition
Feature checklists Who approves what, and whether the audit trail is real

Do not lead with "AI" or "agentic." This audience has heard those words used loosely. Lead with what they can see: a canvas, their templates, an approval that blocks until a human says yes.

Do not disparage AAP's built-in workflows. Many in the room use them daily and they work. The reframe is: AAP workflows chain on success/failure; AO adds branches and gates.

The interactive demo on redhat.com shows EDA triggers and LLM analysis. This demo does not have those wired up. Say so before they ask — beat 5 exists for exactly this.

Beat 1 · The login (TODO)

Show the AO login page. Click "Log in with Ansible Automation Platform". AAP's sign-in page appears — same credentials, same environment badge. Land back in AO, logged in.

"Same credentials you already use. AO authenticates through AAP's gateway — it is not a separate identity store."

Why this beat exists. It defuses the "another system to manage" objection before it forms. The audience sees their own login page appear inside a product they have never opened, and the implication lands without you spelling it out: this thing knows about the AAP they already run.

Transition: "Let me show you what it sees."

Beat 2 · The integration (TODO)

Navigate to Integrations. Show the AAP integration — its status, and the 33 job templates it discovered. Click into the template list.

"These are your existing AAP templates — nothing was migrated, nothing was duplicated. AO connected to AAP and discovered them."

Let them scan the list. If they ask about a specific template, answer from the list — the names match the AAP UI exactly.

Why this beat exists. It proves zero migration cost. The audience needs to believe their investment is preserved before they will listen to what is new. A platform engineer who thinks "we would have to rebuild everything" has already decided, and nothing after this will change it.

Transition: "Now let me build something with them."

Beat 3 · The canvas (TODO)

Build a workflow live on the AO canvas. This is the centerpiece — everything before sets it up, everything after lands it.

Preferred story: Windows Day 2 compliance

Use this when demo VMs are running. The compliance break/fix is short, safe mid-demo, and shows logic nodes and human oversight together.

  1. Drag Windows Day 2 - Compliance Scan onto the canvas
  2. Add a conditional node — branch on the scan result
  3. On the "failed" branch: add an approval node ("Security lead must approve the fix")
  4. After approval: Windows Day 2 - Fix Compliance
  5. After the fix: another Windows Day 2 - Compliance Scan (verify the fix)

Pair it with Windows Day 2 - Break Compliance to set up the failure condition beforehand.

Fallback story: Linux Day 1 chain

Use this when no VMs exist yet — building the workflow also provisions one.

  1. Linux Day 1 - 1 Provision
  2. Linux Day 1 - 2 Register
  3. Add an approval node ("Ops team approves before configuring")
  4. Linux Day 1 - 3 Configure
  5. Linux Day 1 - 4 Compliance Scan

The line that lands it

"Three things AAP workflows cannot express: a branch based on a result, a gate that waits for a human, and both in the same sequence."

Do not rush this sentence. It is the argument. The canvas is the evidence.

Why this beat exists. This is the demo. The audience watches you build — not show a pre-built artifact — a workflow that does something they recognize (compliance, provisioning) using templates they just saw are theirs, with constructs their current platform does not have.

Transition: "Let me run it."

Beat 4 · The execution (TODO)

Run the workflow. Show the execution view — each node progressing, the approval waiting.

When the approval node is reached, pause. Let them see the workflow blocked. Then approve it. Show the audit trail — who approved, when, which execution.

"That approval is not a Slack message someone might miss. It is a gate in the workflow engine. The job does not run until the gate opens, and the gate records who opened it."

If the approval takes time to reach (because earlier nodes are running), use the wait to point out the execution timeline — each node's start, duration, and status updating live.

Why this beat exists. Approval is the feature that justifies AO for regulated environments. A compliance officer who hears "we track approvals in Slack" and one who hears "the workflow engine enforces the gate and logs it" are having two different conversations about audit readiness.

Beat 5 · The honest bits (TODO)

"Two things this demo does not show, and I want to be straight about them."

"First — the interactive demo on redhat.com shows EDA triggers and LLM-based analysis. Those integrations exist in the product but are not wired up in this environment. We can talk about what that would look like for your use case."

"Second — the AO MCP server, the thing that lets an AI assistant query this system, is read-only today. You can inspect workflows and executions but not create them programmatically."

Why this beat exists. These are the questions someone will discover in evaluation. Volunteering them first — before anyone asks — is worth more than the features you just showed. A sysadmin who has sat through demos where the hard parts were skipped will trust the working parts more once you have been straight about the broken ones.

Beat 6 · Close (TODO)

"You saw your templates — the ones you have today — orchestrated with branches and approvals, running on a workflow engine that survives a pod restart. The question is: what sequence in your environment would benefit from a gate that is not a Slack message?"

One question, chosen to fit what you heard earlier:

  • If they asked about compliance: "Which of your compliance workflows today depend on someone remembering to check the result?"
  • If they asked about approvals: "Who in your organization would need to approve a production change, and how do they do it today?"

Pick one. A presenter who offers three questions gets no answer to any of them.

If you only get ten minutes

Keep beats 1, 3, and 5. The login proves integration. The canvas proves value. The honest bits prove trust.

Skip the execution — describe it: "If I ran this, the approval node would block until a named human approves it, and the audit trail would record who and when." That is credible because they just watched you build the workflow with the approval node in it.

Where the words come from

Claim Source
AO is GA, version 2026.8 Release notes
Add-on to AAP 2.7 or later GA blog, Justin Braun, 2026-08-21
33 job templates visible through integration Measured on sandbox via ao-sandbox MCP proxies_aap_job_templates, 2026-09-11
Same credentials via SSO playbooks/configure_ao.yml — OIDC identity provider setup
1.91 vCPU / 2.47 GiB footprint Measured in #141, before/after probe_env.yml
Three databases required (not two) playbooks/install_ao.yml header comment
The May press release said tech preview Summit press release, 2026-05-12
MCP server is read-only utilities/ao-mcp-server.py — 32 tools, no create/update/delete
No branding on AO login page #426, AutomationOrchestrator CR spec has no branding fields
Interactive demo shows EDA + LLM Interactive demo — CVE remediation with EDA trigger and AI analysis
AO API docs at the instance https://<ao-host>/api_docs/v1/docs (Swagger), confirmed 2026-09-11