This past March, the community gathered for Red Hat OpenShift Commons in Amsterdam. As the "zero day" kickoff to KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, there was no shortage of innovative presentations and discussions, but one session stood out, "Sit, Stay, Deploy: Teaching a Robot Dog with Red Hat OpenShift."
Figure 1., ITQ staffers Johan van Amersfoort, Chief Evangelist and AI Lead, and Sander Harrewijnen, Technologist speaking at the OpenShift Commons Gathering in Amsterdam.Presented by ITQ staffers Johan van Amersfoort, Chief Evangelist and AI Lead, and Sander Harrewijnen, Technologist, the session moved beyond theoretical AI to showcase a practical—and adorable—application of cloud-native technology.The challenge: Speed versus complexity in the AI eravan Amersfoort opened the session by highlighting a critical bottleneck in modern enterprise IT, the time to value. AI is developing at unbelievable speed, with breakthroughs in multimodal models and agentic AI happening monthly, and organizations just can't afford long lead times."We know for a fact... that building an opinionated Kubernetes platform can easily take 18 months," van Amersfoort noted. "The reality is simply that a CIO can’t wait for 18 months."ITQ, an IT solutions company, and provider of IT services like Private AI, set out to prove that by using the right platform, organizations could move from 0 to 60 in a matter of weeks rather than years. To demonstrate this, they introduced Q9, a robotic dog that they planned to transform from a "personality-free" machine into an AI-powered office companion.
