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2026 Gartner® Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps

2026 Gartner® Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps
Tim Zimmerman, Mike Leibovitz, Andrew Lerner, Jonathan Forest, Karen Brown - Gartner® Analysts

In its 2026 Strategic Roadmap for Agentic NetOps (5 June 2026 • G00853316), we believe Gartner® finds that persistent IT talent shortages are driving agentic NetOps into the mainstream for complex network runtime activities:

  • By 2030, 50% of organizations will use agentic NetOps with minimal human involvement, up from nearly 0% in 2026.
  • Heads of I&O must first close three critical gaps: outcome, control, and data.

In our opinion, this roadmap describes the exact problem Forward was built to solve: enterprises can't govern autonomous network changes they can't first validate. 

Our understanding is that Gartner recommends establishing rollback testing and understanding blast radius before trusting agentic action, which we feel is precisely what a network digital twin enables:

  • Forward Enterprise: Provides a mathematically accurate, always-current model of the full production network to reason against.
  • Forward Predict: Verifies every proposed change before it touches the production network.

Download the Gartner report for the full analysis and recommendations.

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

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Related FAQs

A network digital twin is a digital model of the network that makes network data accessible and actionable to ensure the network behaves as expected and is secure.
Network, security, and cloud operations teams use the data and insights from a digital twin to troubleshoot issues faster and act proactively to prevent costly outages.
A digital twin model is built by gathering configuration and state data from network devices and then analyzing all the possible paths that packets can take in your network
Key benefits include speeding up mean time to resolution, ensuring security posture and compliance, addressing issues proactively before they cause an outage, increasing collaboration between IT teams, and reducing operational expenses.
Customers using Forward Networks’ digital twin realize an average of $14.2 million in benefits annually due to decreasing productivity loss and downtime
A digital twin provides hop-by-hop path analysis from on-premises networks through the cloud to the internet. This unified view enhances security policy enforcement and reduces costs, delivering a single pane of glass for managing the entire hybrid, multi-cloud network.
Digital twins are currently deployed in commercial organizations with mission-critical networks, such as financial services, healthcare, and entertainment, as well as federal ones in the military, intelligence, and civilian spaces, where network security is a matter of national security.
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