How NetOps Can Prepare for Agentic AI

A Shift Driven by Necessity

Why now? Three converging pressures are making the dashboard UI model unsustainable:

1. Complexity has outpaced human scale
2. Skills remain scarce and costly
3. Business tolerance for downtime has hit zero

The solution emerging isn’t just better automation—it’s something fundamentally different.

Beyond the Chatbot: Understanding the Agentic AI Evolution

You’ve likely encountered AI assistants in your tools already. They can answer questions or execute specific tasks. Helpful, but limited.

The next generation—what industry leaders are calling agentic AI—operates differently. It doesn’t just follow instructions. It understands goals, reasons across systems, and makes decisions within boundaries you define.

Think of it as moving from giving step-by-step directions to setting a destination and letting a capable navigator find the best route.

What This Means for Your Team

The most important question isn’t technical—it’s human.
Will this replace network engineers?

Far from it.
The most successful organizations will see their teams transition from daily operators to strategic orchestrators. Your expertise becomes more valuable, not less—directed toward architecture, policy, and exception management rather than routine troubleshooting.

This is about augmenting human capability, not replacing it.

The Path Forward

This transition won’t happen overnight, but the planning starts now. Leaders who wait risk playing catch-up in an accelerating market.

The immediate steps are practical:

• Evaluatewhere agentic capabilities fit in your stack
• Experimentwith controlled, non-critical pilots
• Educateyour team on both the potential and the boundaries of this technology

The Question to Ask Yourself

When you look at your network operations today, ask:
How much of our work is truly strategic, and how much is keeping the lights on?

The coming shift promises to rebalance that equation—freeing your team to focus on the work that matters most.

GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

Gartner, The Future of NetOps Is Agentic, By Andrew Lerner, Mike Leibovitz, John Watts, Jonathan Forest, 5 January 2026