The “AI as a Service” playbook
Using Tanzu to complete the VCF AI story
Coté
VMUG Connect Amsterdam · March 18, 2026
💾 AI in apps...
👩💻 Code-assisted...
👔 Agentic normie'ing...
Your customers have changed
You used to serve developers. Now you also serve normals.
💾 AI in apps...
- Sales assistants.
- Sloppy integration.
- Science-ing.
- ???
👩💻 Code-assisted...
- New & old code.
- SDLC juicing.
- Trad'l “data science.”
- Making pptx?
👔 Agentic normie'ing...
- Your own ChatGPT.
- Customer service.
- Better search.
- Chat-as-UI
This is your new problem with AI
- You can stand up a service
- ..but then it's just a blinking cursor.
- You need actual appdev on top.
- ...and normie dev.
- I'm going to tell you how VCF with Tanzu does that.
How we got here, fast
😢
There is much power, but much problems.
The one thing you must do right now.
Standards for AI integration, like model context protocol (MCP), are very early; it's a fast-moving world, but they're not all enterprise-ready yet. The solution that Tanzu Platform provides fills the gaps in these enterprise standards while delivering the telemetry we need to understand adoption, usage and continually improve our services.”
We are building this platform not for us, we are building it for Mercedes-Benz developers.”
💾 AI in apps...
👩💻 Code-assisted...
👔 Agentic normie'ing...
Note: audio, pictures, video are omitted.
Sources: Tanzu customers; “AI at Goldman,” FT, September 14th, 2025; “Leverage Generative AI to Streamline the Software Development Lifecycle,” Banu Parasuraman, Andrew Berenato, Explore 2025, August, 2025. “AI? Who me, insecure?” Coté & David Zinzian, Tanzu Catsup, March 2026.
Your customers have changed
You used to serve developers. Now you also serve normals.
💾 AI in apps...
- Sales assistants.
- Sloppy integration.
- Science-ing.
- ???
👩💻 Code-assisted...
- New & old code.
- SDLC juicing.
- Trad'l “data science.”
- Making pptx?
👔 Agentic normie'ing...
- Your own ChatGPT.
- Customer service.
- Better search.
- Chat-as-UI
New things platform engineers will likely do with and for AI
- Hosting models.
- Gateways, brokers.
- Application Frameworks
- ¿Curating models?
- Hosting models with self-service access.
- AIFinOpsBizSREDevOpsEng.
- ¿Eval, testing, safety?
- Audit and compliance.
- Data access.
- Registries - MCP, prompts, integrations.
What app teams and platform teams need from AI
Supports all major frontier & open source models
- Model Context Protocol
- Tool/Function Calling
- Model Eval
- Public & private cloud
- Chat Conversation Memory
- Vector Databases
- RAG
- Embeddings
- Structured Outputs
- ChatClient API
- Chat Completion
- Text to Speech
- Text to Image
- Audio Transcription
- Moderation
- Observability
- Advisors API
- ETL
Tanzu Platform developer services: Rapid agentic development with Spring AI
What CIOs are actually prioritizing
This is aligned with what CIOs want
What developers need and what you provide are the same thing
What developers need
- Model access
- Frameworks (Spring AI)
- Self-service catalog
- Fast iteration & sandboxes
- “AI inference endpoint” not GPU VM tickets
What ops/platform provides
- Governance & security
- Cost controls & quotas
- Approved model catalog
- Infrastructure (VCF)
- Tanzu Application Catalog + AI Gateway
“Stop giving developers blinking cursors. Give them a platform.”
