2025 State of Network Automation Survey Results#

Chris Grundemann — Network Automation Forum

• Why: Field-wide data every PM in this space should have on hand: 681 responses (352 complete) across 58 countries and 34 industries — an order of magnitude larger than prior years (106 in 2024, 78 in 2023).
• What: The headline findings paint a less rosy picture than conference hallways suggest. Mean self-assessed automation is 37.5% (down from ~42% the prior two years — plausibly a sampling effect from more early-stage and enterprise respondents), 73% of orgs are at or below 50% automated. The "half-nots": half of organizations have less than 30% automation, no LLM plans (only 3% have LLMs deployed with production network access; ~45% have no plans), zero dedicated automation staff, don't measure automation success, and are misaligned with leadership. 44% of reported barriers are "people" problems (skills 27%, organizational 20%, cultural 14%); technical is only 10%.
• How: Survey methodology with year-over-year comparability caveats the presenter himself flags ("Caveat Emptor" — sample composition shifted notably: 39% USA vs 58% in 2023, enterprise share up to 42%). Tooling data: 82% homebrew, Ansible dominates OSS (53%), Python at 93% of scripting; top automated tasks are backups and device deployment; the largest gaps between current and desired automation are troubleshooting (+223), capacity planning (+167), and traffic engineering (+156).
• Where applicable: Globally sourced and broadly indicative rather than statistically pure — use the directional findings (people barriers, the troubleshooting gap, minimal production AI) to calibrate roadmap assumptions, not as precise benchmarks.