IT Leaders Test the Waters of Autonomous Network Operations
TechTarget, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
Surveys show AI agents in NetOps are mostly advisory; early adopters like Danfoss see gains from limited autonomous actions.
A Cisco and Omdia survey of 1,000 IT and network operations leaders found 51% use agentic AI in production, but mostly for diagnostics and investigations, with only 18% using agents for remediation and 17% for system changes.
An EMA survey found just 13.2% of IT organizations let agents act on anomalies flagged by observability tools.
Danfoss has deployed HPE's self-driving network agents at 20 to 30 sites for tasks such as isolating nodes, provisioning and handling overloads, and a capacity optimization agent has also improved wireless coverage and roaming.
Trust and governance remain the main hurdles to fully autonomous networks.