Applications are deployed across data centers, multiple public cloud services, and numerous edge locations. Hybrid work initiatives mean employees are increasingly connecting to these applications from the office, their home, and other remote locations. Regardless of where they are, employees expect to be productive and have a positive experience. Likewise, organizations depend on the network environment to deliver highly available and secure connectivity to every application, location, and employee. However, network operations teams now have exponentially more network connections, endpoints, and data traversing the network to contend with.

Operations teams struggle to collect all the network data, correlate it with context, and act decisively to resolve issues that arise. As a result, organizations need to take advantage of the intelligence provided by AI and the ability to automate more than just initial configurations. Importantly, they’ll need to determine how long it will take for operations teams to become comfortable with and trust these technologies as well as the implications of generative AI for network operations.

To gain further insight into these trends, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 362 network professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) involved with network AI and automation technology and processes.