The Operational Gap That's Stalling Autonomous Networking

InnovationThe Operational Gap That's Stalling Autonomous NetworkingByNikhil Handigol,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 28, 2026, 09:15am EDTNikhil Handigol is Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer, Forward Networks, building the foundation for autonomous networking. getty​As networks have grown larger and more complex, one aspect has not evolved. We still operate the backbone of our businesses without a provable understanding of how it actually behaves, and we implement production changes without evidence of their impact.In any other domain, this would not be tolerated. The pharmaceutical industry models molecular interactions before clinical trials. Engineering runs unit and integration tests in a staging environment before deploying systems. Yet in networking, where operational resilience is directly tied to business success, changes are still implemented based on outcomes that cannot be verified before they happen. And it’s (begrudgingly) accepted. ​Outages and security incidents are most frequently caused by erroneous changes made during maintenance windows. This is true across industries and company sizes, and the financial consequences are significant. Gartner estimates (registration required) that a major unplanned network outage costs more than $500,000 per hour, with total business losses that can exceed $1 million.Data is not the problem. Network engineers are inundated with data from tools built for monitoring, change management, configuration management, incident response and more. These tools were designed to help networks scale and improve resilience. In practice, they produce fragmented views and constant alerts. What they do not provide is a complete and provable understanding of how the network behaves across the entire estate. Without that, there is no reliable way to ensure that a prop...