What is Agentic NetOps? Moving from Assistants to Agents
Traditional AI and GenAI tools act as support systems. They provide recommendations, generate reports, or answer questions. But they still require a human to interpret, approve, and execute.
Agentic NetOps is different. As Gartner defines it, it “leverages goal-driven, autonomous AI agents with capabilities such as memory, planning, sensing, tooling and policy guardrails, that have been granted rights by the organization to operate network tasks and processes independently.”
In practice, this means an AI agent can:
- Autonomously detect and prioritize incidents by continuously monitoring network dashboards and performance data.
- Proactively investigate by executing hundreds of troubleshooting and diagnostic actions across devices and domains in seconds.
- Correlate data from security tools, configuration management databases (CMDBs), and ticketing systems to find the root cause.
- Implement a fix—like a configuration change or traffic rerouting—or escalate a precise, validated recommendation to a human for approval.
This comprehensive and near-real-time approach ensures that incidents are addressed more quickly and accurately than would be possible with human operators alone. It transforms the network from a reactive utility into a proactive, self-healing asset that enhances network reliability, improves operational efficiency, and improves the end-user experience at a scale humans cannot match.
The Tangible Benefits: Why This Isn’t Just Hype
Gartner outlines clear, transformational benefits for organizations that embrace this approach:
- Eliminate Costly Outages: Agentic NetOps has the potential to deliver a truly autonomous network with near-real-time self-healing capabilities to reduce outage time and the impact on end users.
- Solve the Skills Gap: It can address resource constraints and skills gaps by minimizing human resources, reducing reliance on vendor- and technology-specific skills, and reducing the risk of a knowledge drain.
- Optimize Resources: Organizations can reallocate network operations personnel to strategy, oversight, architecting, and planning functions. Agentic NetOps also doesn’t get sick, tired, complain, take breaks, or go on vacation, so resource disruptions are much more limited.
- Strengthen Security: Agentic NetOps can respond to security incidents in near real-time, which limits the impact that they can cause.
The Risks of Inaction: “No Change” is the Riskiest Alternative
Gartner is clear: the value of agentic NetOps exceeds previous iterations of AI and automation. The alternative to Agentic NetOps is not standing still; it’s falling dangerously behind. They outline three paths:
- No Change: Gartner estimates that approximately two-thirds of network tasks are still performed manually. This manual operation isn’t scalable, doesn’t address existing issues and doesn’t improve over time.
- Incremental Automation: This approach requires “humans on the loop” at a minimum, and day-to-day tasks will likely still have “humans in the loop”.
- Outsourcing: This involves outsourcing to a managed network service (MNS) provider to operate and manage the network infrastructure.
The report summarizes that, “to gain the full anticipated value of agentic NetOps, organizations need to think transformationally and not incrementally.”
NetBrain: Your Partner on the Path to Autonomy
As a Representative Vendor named in this Gartner research, NetBrain is at the forefront of making Agentic NetOps a production reality today. Our platform is built on the core principles that Gartner identifies as critical:
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- Intent-Based Automation: Our platform enables AI agents to autonomously query other systems, tools and other agents, make network changes, monitor network traffic and use synthetic traffic injection to continuously analyze the network environment in real time.
- A Dynamic Digital Twin: Our platform provides a single-source-of-truth for your entire multi-vendor network, providing the essential context AI agents need to operate safely and effectively.
- Closed-Loop Resolution: We provide the guardrails for AI-driven actions, from diagnosis to verification to safe execution, ensuring trust and reliability.
We are moving past the era of dashboards and alerts and into the era of actions and outcomes.
Ready to Move from Concept to Concrete Value?
The question for network leaders is no longer if Agentic NetOps is the future, but how to start building a strategy today.
Download the full Gartner report, “Agentic NetOps Will Revolutionize Network Operations,” to gain a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities, risks, and roadmap for adoption. This is your first step toward transforming your network operations from a cost center into a competitive advantage.
Download the Gartner Report Now
Gartner, Agentic NetOps Will Revolutionize Network Operations, Jonathan Forest, Andrew Lerner, 6 August 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
