In one embodiment, a distributed intelligence agent (DIA), hosted on a border router that provides access for a computer network to a global computer network, determines a routing topology of the computer network, and also computes a traffic matrix for the computer network based on source and destination addresses of traffic traversing the DIA, the traffic matrix providing an estimate for an amount of traffic on each link of the routing topology. Accordingly, the DIA may determine one or more portions of the routing topology for which traffic engineering (TE) should be applied based on a threshold for traffic loads on the links, and may notify one or more nodes in the computer network to change its respective current next-hop in the routing topology to an alternate next-hop based on a TE solution computed by the DIA.