Ansible is a radically simple IT automation tool that helps automate infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and orchestration of tasks. The presenter discusses how his team was spending too much time on repetitive database administration tasks manually. They discovered Ansible as a solution to automate these tasks. Using Ansible, they were able to define inventory, write idempotent playbooks using tasks, handlers, templates and variables. This improved performance and reliability by ensuring all environments were configured consistently and freeing up time from manual work. Moving forward, they aim to further develop roles and automate additional database management tasks like query tuning and self-healing using Ansible.