At AutoCon 5 in Munich, a NetBrain exec sat down with the Packet Pushers to talk about why so many network teams stall out on agentic AI — and it's usually not a tech problem.
Why teams get stuck
Most organizations have already moved past mapping and documentation and into automation — runbooks, integrations, established workflows. Agentic AI adds a new layer of hesitation on top of that: it means handing decisions to something that isn't human, on systems with real operational stakes. Teams aren't stuck because they're not trying — they're stuck because letting go of control is uncomfortable.
How to move past it
Build trust gradually, the way you would with any new working relationship. Start asking questions of the system instead of troubleshooting the old way, watch whether the answers hold up, and hand over more only as confidence grows. Nobody should expect to jump straight to the deep end.
The easiest starting point is repetitive, time-sensitive work — tickets, for example. Instead of waiting 15–30 minutes for a person to respond, an agent can run diagnostics the moment a ticket lands, so whoever picks it up already has real-time context instead of a stale snapshot.
From there, teams can work toward closed-loop, near-zero-touch operations — diagnose, execute a pre-approved change, verify, close the ticket, all within clearly defined guardrails. The hard part isn't the automation itself; it's agreeing internally on what "good" looks like before you let a system operate inside those boundaries.
One other shift worth watching: integration is moving away from one-off APIs toward agents communicating directly with other agents, which changes the job from handling individual tickets to managing the system as a whole.
Bottom line: the technology is ready. What's usually missing is the internal work — defining guardrails and building trust step by step.
Where are you on this curve? Have you handed any piece of your ticket queue over to an agent yet — or is trust still the sticking point for your team? Drop your experience in the comments.