Ansible's become keyword allows for privilege escalation in managing infrastructure tasks such as deployment, orchestration, cloud provisioning, and security across remote hosts. It uses an agentless, push-based model for seamless communication and consistent management. Tasks are written in YAML and stored in playbooks, which can use built-in or custom modules to execute commands or manage resources. The become keyword enables tasks to run with elevated permissions (defaulting to the root user), whereas become_user specifies the user account Ansible should switch to after privilege escalation, overriding the default (root). They are often used together to enable and customize privilege escalation for specific tasks.