Forward Announces Forward Predict to Make Autonomous Networks a Reality

Santa Clara, California - Wednesday, May 20, 2026 - Forward (formerly Forward Networks), an industry leader in network digital twin technology, today announced Forward Predict, a breakthrough capability that provides comprehensive visibility into the impact of network changes before they are implemented. Forward Predict prevents costly errors from reaching production by running all proposed changes against a mathematically accurate digital twin of the entire production network. This gives organizations the confidence to move faster, operate safely at scale, and build the foundation for autonomous networks.

"When we founded Forward over a decade ago, we had our sights set on the future of autonomous networks," said David Erickson, CEO and co-founder of Forward. "Everything we've built, including the world's first network digital twin, was developed working backward from that goal. An incredible team, advances in computing technology, and 12 years of working closely with the world's largest and most complex networks made this moment possible. Forward Predict is the next critical step on that journey, developed for every organization that values their network."

The production network is no longer a test network

For decades, the production network has been the only true test environment. Despite weeks of preparation, the development of Methods of Procedures (MOPs), lab testing, and Change Advisory Boards, outcomes remain unverified until deployment, making every change fraught with uncertainty, risk, and delay. In any other mission-critical field, this situation would be completely unacceptable. Software engineering teams conduct rigorous testing in staging environments long before deploying to production.

The consequences are severe:
System outages during change windows result in exorbitant costs due to rollbacks, recovery, and delays.
Security vulnerabilities and compliance gaps occur that only become apparent after the damage is done.
Critical initiatives are delayed by weeks or months.
Without mathematically accurate data, AI agents pose an uncontrollable risk at machine speed and scale, making autonomous networks still unattainable.

"We built Forward on the conviction that mathematics could achieve what manual labor never could," said Nikhil Handigol, Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Forward. "Network changes have always involved unnecessary risk because engineers lacked definitive knowledge of how the network would behave. Forward Predict transforms this paradigm by verifying everything before changes occur. This means engineering teams can work based on certainty rather than intuition. This level of certainty is an essential prerequisite for autonomous networks, enabling AI agents to propose, verify, and deploy at machine speed without human intervention."

The digital twin making it possible

Forward Predict is built upon Forward's network digital twin. It is a complete and accurate behavioral model containing the state of every device from every vendor, from the network layer to the application layer. This model understands every way the network processes packets, identifies policy conflicts, and provides mathematically certain answers.

With Forward Predict, these capabilities are extended into the network's future state. Proposed changes are validated against a production-equivalent network digital twin that spans all vendors and clouds. Risks are discovered and resolved before they affect the live network. Through testing, the platform verifies the impact of changes and provides deterministic proof of the outcome.

"Once you see the platform and understand how it works, it's easy to trust," said Steve Bamford, Senior Network Engineer at IG Group. "We deliberately tested scenarios where deploying to production would isolate a segment of the network and take the entire network down. Predict detects those risks. Before moving to production, across the entire production network..."