{"id":16712,"date":"2026-10-14T12:47:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T16:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog2workato.wpengine.com\/?p=16712"},"modified":"2026-10-14T12:47:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T16:47:35","slug":"wow-2026-red-hat-lenovo-enterprise-ai-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog2workato.wpengine.com\/wow-2026-red-hat-lenovo-enterprise-ai-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Hat and Lenovo on What to Build and What to Buy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Red Hat and Lenovo took unscripted questions at WOW Las Vegas 2026 and landed on the same advice: partner for the plumbing, govern it tightly, and get moving.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At WOW: World of Workato<\/a> in Las Vegas, two customers from the main stage took open questions with no slides and no script: Sherry Gentry-Gasper<\/a>, Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Delivery Acceleration at Red Hat<\/a>, and Pooja Sathe<\/a>, Head of AI Ecosystem Partnerships at Lenovo<\/a>. Will Corkery<\/a>, CRO at Workato, moderated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenovo is building an AI assistant, QIRA, that takes actions across the devices it ships to consumers and enterprises. Red Hat’s team runs enterprise architecture and delivery acceleration, including the CI\/CD pipelines behind its internal SaaS applications. While very different, their answers still converged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy the plumbing, build what makes you different<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Lenovo wanted its assistant to act across the apps people use every day, such as Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and YouTube. Pooja said the team weighed building in-house against partnering, and that Workato stood out for how well it understood the problem Lenovo was trying to solve rather than offering a cookie-cutter solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The consumer use case also meant Lenovo couldn’t forecast consumption. Pooja said the Workato account team helped structure a deal around that uncertainty. Lenovo’s own differentiator, she explained, is understanding context, not building connectors. So Lenovo built the infrastructure, including an MCP registry, and Workato helped it build, test, and register connectors at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Red Hat reached the same conclusion from the other direction. Its internal integration platform had grown to about 2,500 Java endpoints, maintained by senior engineers. Sherry said those engineers should be solving business problems, not maintaining integrations. Build versus buy was her toughest internal conversation: Red Hat should build what solves real Red Hat customer problems, not routine tasks like generating a quote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Least privilege is the test for enterprise MCP<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sherry was candid about what she would do differently on day one: spend less time comparing native SaaS MCPs with Workato. Her team follows least privilege and least access, and in her experience many native MCPs were all-or-nothing. Red Hat has since made an architectural decision that its operational MCPs will come from Workato<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her example: an agent that can touch four fields on a quote is a different risk from one that can write back to an entire Salesforce instance. Red Hat’s distinguished engineers tested the platform against requirements like token exchange and session handling before the business got access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speed comes from fewer dependencies and more builders<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Red Hat has about 300 builders, roughly 40% outside IT and engineering. Sherry credited three things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n