Juniper Networks rolled out Mist’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine across wired and wireless networks today to kick off its annual Nxtwork event. It’s the first step in what Juniper calls the “AI-driven enterprise” that will use AI and automation to troubleshoot and self-correct across the entire IT environment.

“For that we mean wireless access, wired access, and ultimately data centers as well as SD-WAN with a security overlay on top of that,” said Jeff Aaron, VP of enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks.

Juniper acquired wireless LAN startup Mist Systems for $405 million earlier this year. In addition to the wireless technology, the deal gave Juniper an in-house AI engine. “The larger vision here is that Mist is the cornerstone of Juniper’s AI-driven enterprise story,” Aaron said.

Today the company extended the Mist platform from wireless networks to also cover wired networks with a new wired assurance service. This feature feeds Junos switch telemetry data into the Mist microservices-based cloud and AI engine. It can measure wired user experience and provide pre-and post-connection performance metrics for IoT endpoints. It also detects anomalies and can proactively alert administrators when there is a deviation in switch performance.

Additionally, the AI engine can now identify root cause of both wired and wireless problems, and automate some remediations including automatically adding missing VLAN configurations and correcting switch port misconfigurations.

Juniper also extended the platform’s Marvis AI-based virtual network assistant (Aaron describes this as “Alexa for IT”) to cover both wired and wireless networks. This service allows administrators to ask questions — like “What is wrong with my switch?” and get answers and insights.

Plus, Juniper unveiled a new Marvis Actions dashboard. This is a capability within Mist’s Marvis service. Marvis uses Mist’s integrated AI-engine, and it identifies the root cause of issues across various IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN, and security). It then automatically resolves them when possible. If the issue is outside the domain of the access network, Marvis will provide recommended actions for IT to resolve the issue.

New Mist business has grown 42% since the acquisition six months ago. And the company claims three of the Fortune 10 and more than 25 of the Fortune 500 companies standardized on Mist. Meanwhile five of the top 20 telcos sell Mist managed services, and/or reseller partners.

“In a short period of time we’re been able to notch a whose who in terms of customers that have switched from Cisco and Meraki and Aruba,” Aaron said. The Orlando VA Medical Center, Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, and University of Texas-Dallas are a few.

But all of the major vendors including Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and HPE Aruba are pushing AI-based capabilities as a competitive differentiator. So while Aaron says Juniper is gunning for these competitors, it still has to sell its AI-driven enterprise story to customers.

There are four primary areas where Juniper and Mist claim superior technology, Aaron says. First: Mist provides client-level visibility. “You can say I want every one of my users to connect in two seconds or less, and we will be able to tell you exactly what users are hitting that and if certain levels of users are having issues,” he explained.

Additionally, Mist technology included AI from day one, Aaron said. “We’ve been doing this for five years, we are in our third-generation algorithms, we’ve been learning for a much longer time and we have a much larger head start.”

It’s also got a microservices-based cloud, that Aaron says gives Mist an edge. “If you are collecting all that data, you need a purpose-built and modern cloud to do machine learning and data science on top of that,” he said. Some competitors use appliances to collect data, and “Meraki uses a 15-year-old cloud built before the Amazon cloud even existed,” he added.

And finally, Mavis, Mist’s IT virtual assistant, provides its final advantage, Aaron said.

Craig Mathias, an analyst at Farpoint Group, says Juniper’s Mist-centric strategy, which brings AI, machine learning, and automation into the enterprise, “is a great strategy.”

“The key to success these days is in helping customers to reduce their operating expense via improvements in operations-staff productivity,” he said in an email. “That’s exactly what Mist is doing here in extending previously wireless-only capabilities into the wired network —another element in the already present trend to unified wired/wireless networking, and an obvious reason why Juniper did the acquisition.”

Wireless, he added “is now clearly driving the evolution of the wired network, which, after all, exists in large (if not largest) part today to support that wireless network. I suspect that AI will further make its way into many more elements in IT operations, so, in a sense, wireless is now in fact driving the future of IT overall.”