Itential Launches FlowAI as Agentic Ops Come to the Fore

Itential today announced the availability of its FlowAI at Cisco Live US 2026. This ground-breaking network infrastructure operations product, which will be generally available on July 1, helps enterprises implement AI agents on infrastructure with governance, security, and operational controls.

As Futuriom recently described in its Tech Primer on safely implementing agentic infrastructure operations, enterprises are looking for safe ways to introduce agentic operations to improve orchestration and automation. But there are many safety and compliance issues to be worked out.

Infrastructure pros have been looking to build full network and infrastructure automation by adopting visibility tools, investing in workflow orchestration, and deploying AIOps platforms. Yet complete, multi-step automation has long remained elusive, with humans remaining in the loop most steps of the way.

Taking the Risks Out of Probabilistic Outcomes

When you take a closer look at FlowAI, it's a product designed to implement safety and control for agentic systems, specifically at the infrastructure layer.

The area of agentic infrastructure operations is becoming quite complex and requires several layers of technology, including structure around the way that agentic systems use reasoning and context to take action.

As we explained in the Tech Primer, an AI agent is an autonomous system that perceives its environment, reasons through context, constructs a plan, and executes actions toward a goal. That’s different from a chatbot, which reacts to input; or a copilot, which collaborates with a human but doesn’t act independently.

Agentic operations are different from traditional automation, which historically has followed scripted policies triggered by specific conditions. In network and cloud operations, this includes common scripting and infrastructure automation tools such as Chef, Ansible, and Terraform.

With FlowAI, Itential looks to take the next step: Moving beyond traditional, scripted playbooks by implementing independent reasoning, tool selection, and feedback loops to autonomously resolve network challenges.

This approach takes probabilistic AI systems and builds better controls around the outcomes. In other words, FlowAI looks to make safe decisions that can reliably take humans out of the loop.

Itential has been at the forefront of pairing AI reasoning with deterministic, policy-governed execution, an architecture that enterprises increasingly require to operationalize agentic systems safely.

Cisco Calls Out Agentic Operations

The timing of Itential's FlowAI is fortuitous, as several executives at Cisco's Press and Analyst day here today in Las Vegas said that customers are increasingly inquiring about solutions for safe agentic AI operations, as well as security.

"This is a new area, what we are talking about here is observing the agent behavior," said Ammar Maraqa, Cisco's Chief Strategy officer, when I asked him about Cisco's strategy in an analyst Q&A. "I do believe it's a new category."

Cisco recently announced two planned acquisitions in the area of AI security and opeartions, including Galileo and Astrix Security. Galileo, announced in April, is an AI observability and evaluation play. Cisco describes Galileo as a platform for evaluating AI quality, detecting AI failures before they reach users, and improving AI behavior in production.

The acquisition of Astrix, announced in early May, secures the identities and credentials used by applications, services, and AI agents, including API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, excessive privileges, and real-time threats.

Three-layer Components of FlowAI

FlowAI isn't a dedicated security tool, but it provides safety and security for customers building agentic infrastructure operations. So how exactly does FlowAI work?

Itential uses a three-layer architecture in FlowAI: Agentic Reasoning, Deterministic Execution, and Integration & Connectivity. An agent that reasons well but executes without a deterministic layer becomes a production risk. A platform with strong reasoning and execution but limited connectivity can’t operate at enterprise scale.

Itential believes a three-layer model can transform agentic operations.

Here's how that works:

• The Agentic Reasoning layer is where the AI perceives context, interprets intent, and constructs a plan.
• The Deterministic Execution layer is where that plan becomes governed action. It encompasses both orchestration—sequencing, state management, approval gates, and failure handling—and the actual execution of changes against infrastructure.
• The Integration & Connectivity layer determines what the agent can actually reach: the APIs, protocols, and adapters that connect reasoning and execution to the full breadth of hybrid infrastructure—network controllers, cloud platforms, ITSM systems, security tools, and more.

When all of this is put together, Itential belives that FlowAI will provide the key to safe and secure agentic systems with full governance capabilities.

Right now, FlowAI includes:

• FlowAgents - task-oriented reasoning agents that work toward goals through governed workflows, with full reasoning traces preserved for audit.
• FlowAgent Builder - the application for building role-based agents with defined purposes, toolsets, and policy boundaries.
• FlowMCP Gateway - extends Itential governance, authentication, and policy enforcement to external infrastructure agents and MCP tools through Itential Gateway.

Itential orginally released FlowAI in private preview in November of 2025, and the company says it has spent six months validating the product across telecom, financial services, and utilities through the FlowAI Innovation Program.

One important public customer is Lumen, which provided a quote for the product release:

“When you’re operating infrastructure at Lumen’s scale, the question was never whether AI could help - it was whether we could trust it in production and Itential’s FlowAI answered that,” said Greg Freeman, Vice President, Network and Customer Transformation, Lumen. “Our teams were building production-ready agents in minutes, within the same governance and access controls we already rely on. As we build the next digital backbone for AI, this is the next evolution in our journey with Itential and it’s redefining how we operate networks at scale.”

Futuriom Take: FlowAI is an important new infrastructure operations software release that looks to take agentic operations to the next level, providing full context, control, and connectivity for enterprises looking to implement agentic infrastructure ops. The timing appears to be perfect, as Cisco says customers are looking for exactly these types of solutions.