Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly ray of platform engineering sunshine. Every week, we dive into another realm of the platform engineering universe. This time on an underappreciated, but truly gamechanging topic - platform engineering and AI native infrastructure. Let’s get crunchy.

But first,

• 82% (so far) say their orgs are pushing AI. But only 50% share they have initiatives direct from the C-suite. What does your world look like? Answer the State of AI platform engineering
• PlatformCon LDN & NYC agenda is filling up. What speaker are you most excited for?
• This is the AI platform engineering whitepaper that inspired this newsletter

Cloud native to AI native with platform engineering

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few months arguing that platform engineering and AI are the key symbiotic relationship of the next 5 years. AI will accelerate and empower platform engineering, and platform engineering will accelerate and empower AI.

It’s easy to understand how chatbots and code assistants might improve platform engineering, but I get a LOT of questions on the reverse. How does platform engineering accelerate AI?

Well, Kevin Cochrane from Vultr just published a banger one-two punch community webinar & article breaking down some perfect examples of how platform engineering:

• Accelerates AI delivery with reusable infra templates (golden paths) that simplify GPU setup and let developers focus on models, not environments.
• Enables secure, scalable AI across hybrid and multi-cloud with composable, policy-governed infra.
• Turns infra into a product, giving platform teams control while powering up engineers with fast, self-service access to AI-ready resources.

If you’ve been in tech for a while, you know how seismic the changes were in 2001, and 2013. I’m a strong believer (and it seems Kevin is too) that we’re in the same paradigm shift now.

And like back then, you aren’t going to be able to just float along with it. We will need to adapt to AI native in the same way we did to cloud native.

To survive in the AI native era, platform teams need to redefine how infrastructure is designed, deployed, and delivered, and turn infra from a bottleneck into an accelerant.

And platform engineering is the way to do it.