The speaker, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, presented a new tool called NM-State that aims to simplify network management for CIS admins. The tool is declarative and uses Network Manager as a backend while communicating with Kana via NISPOR. NM-State handles everything, including normalization, validation, verification, and automatic resolution of interdependencies between interfaces. The tool can perform rollbacks and offer a no-commit option with a timeout. The speaker demonstrated how to use NM-State through YAML files and provided examples for using it on different interfaces, DNS, and routing policies. The audience asked questions about the tool's support for dummy interfaces and the use of Netlink.