Independent analyst firm Appledore Research examines how Itential FlowAI is redefining what’s possible for service providers & telcos, and why the industry’s approach to automation must fundamentally change.
A New Framework for Network Autonomy
For years, the telecom industry has chased the promise of autonomous networks. Level 4. Lights out. Hands off. And yet, for most service providers, significant human intervention remains the norm, not the exception.
The reason isn’t lack of investment or ambition. It’s that the industry has been trying to solve the wrong problem.
In this independent solution profile, Appledore Research makes the case that reaching true network autonomy requires a new architectural approach – one that clearly distinguishes between tasks that should be deterministic and tasks that demand agentic intelligence.
And it identifies Itential’s FlowAI technology as one of the most credible platforms for achieving agentic operations.
Not All Automation Problems Are the Same
Appledore draws a critical distinction the industry has largely overlooked: well-understood, deterministic tasks (configuring a port, selecting a path, provisioning a credential) require consistency and repeatability. Applying non-deterministic AI here introduces risk, not efficiency.
The harder problems are different. Complex, cross-domain workflows with too many variables to anticipate, too many systems to coordinate, and too much at stake to hard-code a response. This is where agentic AI doesn’t just help – it’s the only viable path forward.
Itential FlowAI is built to handle both, giving each the treatment it requires.
Itential has seized on the reality that not all workflows or tasks are created equally… powerful Agentic AI methods are supported where they can be most successful and beneficial.
Appledore Research
What Makes Itential Different:
AI First. Not AI Added.
Most vendors have responded to the AI moment by layering intelligence on top of existing platforms.
Itential takes the opposite approach: it is architected from the ground up as an AI-first environment, where agentic reasoning is central to how workflows are built, executed, and adapted – not a feature bolted on afterward.
At the core is the Itential Platform, providing the governance, guardrails, and execution framework needed to ensure AI reasoning is carried out safely and predictably across your infrastructure.
The FlowAI technology extends the platform with three core components designed to work together as a complete agentic orchestration environment:
FlowAgent Builder
Design role-based AI agents with specific personas, reasoning models, and operational responsibilities, defining exactly what each agent can see, propose, and execute within your infrastructure environment.
FlowAgents
AI agents that reason dynamically, adapt based on context, and coordinate across agentic and deterministic workflows, including those involving human actions and third-party systems.
FlowMCP Gateway
Part of the Itential Automation Gateway, FlowMCP Gateway enables external LLMs, AI agents, and vendor-supplied MCP tools to connect to Itential’s automations, workflows, and APIs, so external intelligence can apply execution logic under Itential’s governance.
The result, as Appledore describes it, is a platform that can “adapt its workflow based on context and what it finds” – a capability that has historically required highly trained, expensive human technicians. FlowAI makes it available at scale.
Lumen Shows What’s Possible
From 16 Workflows to 350, and Now, Agentic AI at the Core
Lumen Technologies has been one of the telecom industry’s most forward-thinking operators when it comes to network automation. For years, they’ve used Itential as their cross-domain workflow execution engine, building a growing library of modular, reusable workflows that span everything from line card selection to trouble ticket creation.
The numbers tell the story:
16 Workflows
2020 | Crawling
→
112 workflows
2022 | Wailng
→
350+ Workflows
2025 | Running
But the real transformation came with the introduction of agentic AI. In Lumen VP of Network and Customer Transformation Greg Freeman’s words, agentic AI is “AI that takes action” and it has fundamentally changed what’s possible.
Today, AI agents sit at the core of Lumen’s most complex workflows, acting simultaneously as supervisor agents (orchestrating the big picture) and as execution agents (handling specific tasks). They can access OTDR data, fault data, configuration workflows, and dispatch processes, dynamically assembling a response to conditions that no engineer could have fully anticipated in advance.
This is what Appledore calls the “swivel chair” problem: the highly trained, experienced technician who holds the entire context of a complex network situation in their head, makes judgment calls, and coordinates across systems and people. That role is both scarce and expensive. Itential’s FlowAI technology is making it scalable.
Independent Validation of a
Category-Defining Approach
Appledore Research doesn’t position Itential as a point solution competing in a crowded market. Their analysis places FlowAI at the center of a new category, agentic orchestration, that is distinct from traditional domain management, cross-domain service orchestration, and conventional AIOps.
Their conclusion is direct: Itential has built something architecturally different, targeting the problems that have most resisted automation – the complex, variable, human-dependent workflows that consume the majority of operational labor across service providers worldwide.
For network operators who have been promised autonomous networks and delivered incremental progress, this profile is worth reading in full.
We salute Itential for recognizing that there are different kinds of tasks that require different kinds of solutions and for embracing AI specifically where it can deliver the greatest good, while explicitly omitting it from the areas for which it is ill suited.
Appledore Research
Ready to see agentic orchestration in action?
Talk to our team about how the Itential Platform and FlowAI technology is helping service providers move beyond the limits of traditional automation – and start crossing the chasm.
