In a world where data is king, telecommunications networks have found themselves responsible for making sure that the data gets to where it is going - and taking the blame when it doesn’t. Such responsibility is fast growing beyond the ability of us mere human beings, requiring new intelligent and adaptive champions to take up the challenge. Containers and virtual machines are seen as the steeds of these new champions, but do they offer the right flexibility and granularity? This talk will discuss the new wave of intelligent automation in the telco domain, and highlight the need for dynamic intelligent runtimes if we want to go beyond an army of ‘ML + Use Case’ champions.