Analyst report

The future of network operations is agentic, and it runs through your data

Gartner® predicts that “By 2030, 50% of organizations will use agentic NetOps with minimal human involvement, up from nearly 0% in 2026.”

But how do you get there? 

The 2026 Gartner Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps

2026 Gartner® Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps

Gartner says, there are three gaps that continue to create hurdles for enterprises deploying agentic NetOps:

  • The Outcome Gap: Enterprises lack clearly defined, measurable business outcomes to guide agent behavior and validate performance.
  • The Control Gap: Many enterprises struggle with their current governance models without adding independently operating NetOps solutions to mix and defining the decisioning rights or trust frameworks that are required for agent-initiated execution. This framework for guardrails and decisioning must also scale from homogeneous to multivendor to multidomain.
  • The Data Gap: AI models and training are only as good as the data they use. But today’s data is incomplete or uneven.


Download the 2026 Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps to understand what steps are necessary to address these hurdles, prepare your organization for AI network automation, all while building stronger SLAs, driving efficiency, closing skills gaps and reducing risk along the way.

 

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Agentic NetOps requires a trusted data foundation. Gartner says, "AI models and training are only as good as the data they use."

The data foundation

Build the right data layer with the NetBox Labs platform

The NetBox Labs platform unifies your system of record, operational intelligence, and automation into one control plane that humans and AI agents can both act on with confidence.

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Agentic NetOps requires a trusted data foundation
Build one canonical record of every device, connection, IP address, and dependency, replacing spreadsheets, stale CMDBs, and tribal knowledge.
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The largest community in infrastructure automation
Hundreds of contributors, the broadest plugin marketplace in the category, and a curated catalog of infrastructure component metadata.
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Enterprise grade from day one
SSO and SAML, RBAC, high availability, and SOC 2 Type II, ready for the security and procurement teams every network engineer has to bring along.
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Accountable by design
Every action is traceable and every actor accountable, because humans and AI agents share the same control surface.
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Today, without the NetBox Labs platform, our backbone configuration management wouldn't work. It's a key part of our automation.
Principal Network Engineer
Salesforce

Gartner, 2026 Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps, Tim Zimmerman, Mike Leibovitz, Andrew Lerner, Jonathan Forest, Karen Brown, 5 June 2026.

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