Forging the open path: How Red Hat engineering is adopting AI and what it means for open source

Forging the open path: How Red Hat engineering is adopting AI and what it means for open source The "why:" AI, Red Hat, and the open source imperative The rollout: Choice and productivity The sandbox: Internal experimentation The platform: Running it the Red Hat way The lessons: AI demands better engineering The journey ahead Get started with AI for enterprise: A beginner’s guide About the authors Chris Wright Josh Boyer More like this Red Hat Satellite 6.18: New AI, Management, and Security Capabilities GPU-as-a-Service for AI at scale: Practical strategies with Red Hat OpenShift AI Technically Speaking | Driving healthcare discoveries with AI Technically Speaking | Security for the AI supply chain Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Over the past several months, Red Hat has been diving into one of the most significant shifts in our industry: the practical, large-scale adoption of generative AI (gen AI) within a major engineering organization. We are not unique in this journey, but at Red Hat, "in the open" isn't just a development model—it's our culture. We believe it's important to share what we're doing, what we're learning, and how we see this shaping the future of open source collaboration. To be clear, this isn't a publicity piece about a single, perfect tool or an instant success. It's a story about culture, choice, and how AI—when grounded in solid engineering principles—becomes a powerful accelerator for open source innovation. It's impossible to ignore AI’s hype, but what’s obscured by all that buzz is a fundamental truth—AI is a new layer of the technology stack. It's a capability multiplier, much like compilers, the IDE, and the cloud were before it. For Red Hat, our "why" is twofold: Internal acceleration : We have thousands of engineers working on millions of lines of code across thousands of upstream projects. The potential for our engineers to augment their work with AI to reduce toil, accelerate problem-solving, and automate mundane tasks is massive. We owe it to our engineers to provide them with the best tools to do their best work. The open source future : More importantly, Red Hat’s mission is to be the defining technology company of the 21st century, and we believe open source is the best way to build technology. If AI remains a proprietary "black box" world, it runs counter to everything we stand for.