How SUSE positions itself as the infrastructure layer for the AI era

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, SUSE said it is moving beyond being just an open source OS vendor.

Pete Smails outlined an open infrastructure platform built around Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, and the AI assistant Liz.

Rancher Prime is positioned to manage Kubernetes, AI agents, and cloud-native operations for enterprise teams.

SUSE Virtualization aims to modernize legacy VM workloads, while Liz uses live cluster data and MCP to give context-aware help.