Networking: The Secret Sauce for Agentic AI Success
Quick answer
IDC survey reveals networking as the key bottleneck for agentic AI production. Learn how infrastructure platforms can streamline security, automation, and governance.
Enterprises are diving headfirst into AI pilots, but the leap to production is more like wading through a swamp—slow and murky. According to IDC’s 2026 AI in Networking Special Report Survey, sponsored by Google Cloud, the bottleneck isn’t the AI models themselves; it’s the infrastructure, with networking concerns leading to project delays and abandonment.
What’s Holding Back Agentic AI?
The survey highlights three main obstacles:
- Security concerns (32.6%): As AI workflows become more distributed, enforcing consistent security and governance gets trickier.
- Automation challenges (26.8%): Manual operations and fragmented controls slow deployment and scaling.
- Staff talent gaps (24.7%): Limited skills and bandwidth constrain production readiness.
Agentic AI—with its dynamic interactions across apps, APIs, and clouds—amplifies these issues, expanding the security and governance surface area.
Networking: The Foundation for Control
Networking isn’t just about connecting things; it’s the control plane for policy, observability, and security across agentic workflows. Framework-level controls alone fall short when agents span different runtimes and clouds. An infrastructure-level approach provides consistent policy implementation without replacing application frameworks. This is where cloud network services become strategic.
Platform vs. Best-of-Breed: A Balancing Act
Agentic AI systems are inherently fragmented. The survey shows organizations are split between platform and best-of-breed preferences. Among platform fans, the top reasons are stronger security (32.9%), reduced complexity (27.7%), and faster deployment (24.2%). IDC suggests a balanced approach: platforms should be open, modular, and extensible, allowing best-of-breed integrations without a complete architectural overhaul.
As agentic AI evolves, point solutions alone won’t cut it. The right networking approach—backed by open, flexible infrastructure platforms—is key to operational control, consistent policy, and end-to-end trust. For more on infrastructure imperatives, check out Google Cloud’s whitepaper.
Original announcement published on Google Cloud.