Split network operations into a planning agent and an executing agent and you have an elegant design on paper. One agent reasons about what should change and validates it. The other carries it out. The elegance is real, and so is the structural consequence: the split puts the entire weight of judgment on the planner. A plan built on a partial view, then executed precisely and at machine speed, is more dangerous than a cautious human who would have hesitated at the part that did not add up.
The pressure to build this anyway is not subtle. Gartner® names the underlying problem in its analysis of agentic roles in network operations: “The widening gap between escalating network complexity and a shrinking skilled workforce will render traditional, human-centric NetOps unsustainable.” That gap is why planning and execution are being handed to agents at all. It is also why the planner’s view has to be right.
Where Selector is named
Selector is named in the analysis of the Gartner research on DSE and DNO AI agents for network operations, identified as one of the emerging vendors in the discussion of digital agents for NetOps.
The following is Selector’s own opinion, not a statement of fact from Gartner. We believe the part of this design that determines whether it works is the view the planning agent reasons from: one correlated picture that spans the whole network rather than a single domain or vendor’s portion of it. A planner working from a complete picture produces plans worth executing, and producing that picture is what Selector is for.
The planner carries the risk
A planning agent earns its place on routine, structured work first, but that is not where the value concentrates. Gartner is direct about it: “where AI agents can truly shine is in handling unstructured, nondeterministic workflows, with troubleshooting being a prominent example.” Troubleshooting a cross-signal problem is exactly the work that breaks on a partial view. It demands reasoning across domains that rarely share a data model, and a planner that cannot see across those domains will validate its plan against a version of reality with sections missing.
The planner-doer split sharpens that failure mode rather than softening it. When a human plans a change from a fragmented view, their own hesitation is a backstop; they pause at the part that looks wrong. Remove the human from planning and put a tireless executor downstream, and the hesitation is gone while the speed climbs. A confident, wrong plan becomes a confident, wrong change across every device in scope, applied faithfully.
The report’s own account of what a planner should draw on points at the same requirement. A capable planner needs to “interpret real-time data, user history, operational context, and consume enterprise artifacts like diagrams, templates, SOPs, and design principles.” None of that helps if the real-time data beneath it is siloed by domain and vendor. Correlating and normalizing that data across the whole estate is what gives a planner one coherent picture to reason from, and vendor independence is what keeps that picture from ending at a single footprint, which is the same reason the planner can validate a change before the executor ever touches it.
Designing the handoff
If you are evaluating a planner-and-doer approach, the groundwork sits with the planner’s inputs. Give the planner one correlated picture, normalizing telemetry across domains and vendors before you trust any agent to plan against it, since the plan can only be as complete as the view it starts from. Validate proposed changes against that full cross-domain model, so the executor carries out a plan that accounts for the whole network rather than one slice. And pilot the handoff where scope is contained, requiring explainable plans and reliable rollback, and widening autonomy only as planning quality proves out.
The organizations that get value from separating planning and execution will be the ones whose planning agent reasons from a complete picture. Everything the executor does well, it does because the planner saw the whole network first.
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Required disclosures
Gartner, DSE and DNO AI Agents Will Transform and Optimize Network Operations, Marissa Schmidt, Andrew Lerner, Mike Leibovitz, 28 January 2026.
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