Networking of the future to include cloud and automation?

I'm sure we've all had these discussion with our co-workers at some point, but lately I notice when I mention I'm studying AWS SAA-02, I almost get this look of 'why'? Sometimes I get the actual question "Why made you want to study that?" and I have a time of explaining, ....because I ]m interested in it, but also because I think our networking engineering jobs are heading that way along with automation in the future, down the road, however you want to put it. I'm curious though what you guys think. I mean Cisco offers DevNet now, so to me that speaks something for us as network guys. Would it be beneficial for network professionals who are still going to be in out field 15-25 years more down the road be proactive in learning automation and cloud or should we just stick with enterprise r&s? Thoughts?