The Network Capability AI Has Been Waiting For - BRKPAR-1026#

Nikhil Handigol (Forward)

• Why: A partner session, but it points at a genuinely novel operational pattern: a mathematically accurate network digital twin as the reasoning layer for both human changes and autonomous AI agents.
• What: Demonstration of pre-deployment verification of routing and firewall changes on a formal network model, catching regressions before production, and automated end-to-end impact assessment replacing manual approval cycles (from abstract only).
• How: Formal verification of network state and behavior (the Forward Networks model-checking lineage) applied as the guardrail that lets AI agents act on production networks with verified-before-risk confidence.
• Where applicable: Formal-model based, vendor- and device-neutral in principle (Forward ingests multi-vendor configs); the AI-agent-trust framing is early but directly relevant to where network automation is heading.