Every vendor in networking has an agent story right now. The useful question for an operations leader is which of those agents can plan, act, and verify against a trustworthy model of the network, and which are assistants that retrieve and suggest, then leave the decision to a person.
The direction of travel is settled. Gartner® calls it “the biggest shift in network operations in ~20 years,” and says, “By 2029, agent-initiated execution will be the primary approach for network runtime activities, up from less than 1% in 2025.”
A shift that size changes what your data has to do. Dashboards were built for people to read. An agent does not read a dashboard. It compares how the network is supposed to behave with how it is actually behaving, and acts on the difference. That comparison has a name worth dwelling on: the baseline.
Where Selector is named
Selector is named as a Representative Provider in the Gartner Innovation Insight on agentic NetOps software, listed in the over-the-top vendor category.
We want to be clear that the following is Selector’s own view, not a statement of fact from Gartner. We believe agentic operations rest on a correlated baseline of the network, and that this is where Selector contributes. An agent plans and verifies against a baseline of intended and observed state across configuration, performance, policy, and topology. The trustworthiness of that baseline is Selector’s core concern.
What a baseline actually is
A baseline is not a snapshot. It is a living model of two things held side by side: what the network was designed to do, and what it is doing at this moment, across every domain. An agent reasons by measuring the distance between them. A drift in configuration, a path that no longer matches intent, a policy that has quietly stopped being enforced; each is a gap between intended and observed state, and each is only visible if both halves of the baseline are complete.
That completeness is where most environments fall short. Telemetry arrives in silos, each domain with its own tools and its own version of the truth. A human can hold several of those views in mind and reconcile them by experience. An agent cannot. It works from whatever baseline it is given, and a baseline stitched from partial, per-domain, per-vendor sources yields partial plans and partial verification. This is the line between an assistant and an agent. As Gartner frames it, “Assistants surface information; agents plan and effect change under guardrails with verification and rollback.” Both the planning and the verification depend on a single, coherent baseline. Without it, an agent can recount what happened but cannot reliably reason about why, or confirm that its own fix actually closed the gap it set out to close.
Correlation and normalization across domains are what assemble that baseline from scattered telemetry. They are also why vendor and infrastructure independence matter: a baseline that covers only one vendor’s footprint is missing half of its own definition, and an agent reasoning across a partial model will be confidently wrong in exactly the places no single tool was watching.
Getting the baseline right
If you are preparing for agent-mediated operations, the groundwork is less exotic than the term suggests. Build the baseline first: get cross-domain telemetry into one normalized, correlated model of intended and observed state, since that is the thing every agent reasons against and the part you can build now, whichever agent you pick later. Gartner says, “Not all ‘agents’ are agentic, many offerings marketed as agents are assistants or scripted workflows without event initiation, explainable planning, verification, or rollback. Buyers should require evidence of agentic behavior.” Pilot where reasoning beats scripts: cross-signal diagnostics, root cause analysis, and drift remediation are where a correlated baseline and an explainable plan pay off first.
The vendors that benefit from this shift will not be the ones with the loudest agent. They will be the ones whose baseline was already trustworthy enough to reason against. That work starts well before the agent arrives.
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Required disclosures
Gartner, Innovation Insight: Agentic NetOps Software Redefines Networking, Mike Leibovitz, Jonathan Forest, Andrew Lerner, Tim Zimmerman, Nauman Raja, 18 February 2026.
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