University of Luxembourg and Inria Futurewei Technologies, Inc. 3NLab Belgium Reseach Center Central Bank of Canada Digital Railway (DSD) at Deutsche Bahn This document is intended to introduce the challenges to overcome when network management problems may require to couple with AI solutions. On the one hand, there are many difficult problems in Network Management that to this date have no good solutions, or where any solutions come with significant limitations and constraints. Artificial Intelligence may help produce novel solutions to those problems. On the other hand, for several reasons (computational costs of AI solutions, privacy of data), distribution of AI tasks became primordial. It is thus also expected that network SHOULD be operated efficiently to support those tasks. To identify the right set of challenges, the document defines a method based on the evolution and nature of NM problems. This will be done in parallel with advances and the nature of existing solutions in AI in order to highlight where AI and NM have been already coupled together or could benefit from a higher integration. So, the method aims at evaluating the gap between NM problems and AI solutions. Challenges are derived accordingly, assuming solving these challenges will help to reduce the gap between NM and AI.