Critically-acclaimed TV show The Last of Us is back. As a huge fan, I find striking parallels between the series’ post-apocalyptic environment and modern digital operations. Just as Ellie and Joel’s (the main characters) world was fundamentally changed by an unstoppable force of nature, today’s operations are being radically transformed by increasingly complex, interconnected systems, and the power of AI and automation.

While the show’s characters face evolved threats and new dangers, they learn that survival isn’t about individual heroics—it’s about adaptation, collaboration, and making the most of every resource. Similarly, as incidents become more frequent, complex, and costly to an organization’s reputation and revenue, teams face their own apocalypse: floods of data, alerts, and the pressure to respond faster than ever before.

Building operational resilience has never been more critical to overcome and anticipate the next outage. While AI and automation bear their own complexities and risks, they can also unlock unprecedented operational resilience, making the full lifecycle more efficient, and even autonomous. By partnering with trusted vendors and implementing safe, reliable AI practices, organizations can turn these powerful technologies into a competitive edge—not by replacing human expertise, but by augmenting it to drive real business outcomes.

Previously, we’ve explored the similarities between different types of incidents and the infected zombies that populate the world of The Last of Us. But there’s more to learn from this popular franchise. Let’s see what it can teach us about surviving—and thriving—in the age of AI and automation for operations.

Lesson One: Find immunity by combining humans and agents AI

While Ellie’s immunity to the Cordyceps virus offers hope, there is no cure. In a world where the infected lurk around every corner, instinctive fight-or-flight responses don’t cut it. Survival demands more. People must lean on one another and combine their skills and resources to build what once was deemed impossible: a life worth living amid the harshest of conditions.

In the real world of operations, there is also no cure for incidents. When teams operate in a purely reactive mode, i.e., scrambling to fight fires as they happen, business continuity is constantly at risk. Successful operations go beyond basic incident response. They scale efficiency by streamlining knowledge sharing, and leveraging collective expertise to overcome and anticipate disruption smarter, faster, and better than before—just like the community of survivors we meet in the new season of The Last of Us.

PagerDuty’s AI agents augment and guide human expertise to dramatically improve efficiency, mitigate the customer impact of downtime, and accelerate the pace of innovation. Feeding from over 15 years of real incident data and operating within secure, reliable AI protocols, PagerDuty AI agents are purpose-built to help customers tackle 3 types of critical work:

• Well-understood: After years of living in a post-apocalyptic world, The Last of Us characters have built enough experience to easily eliminate common threats. In operations, routine tasks drain a lot of time and resources—but they shouldn’t. AI agents can autonomously handle and even resolve well-known issues without human intervention.
• Partially understood: Joel combines his past life experience with Ellie’s agility to safely navigate areas that are mostly unrecognizable post-apocalypse. Similarly, AI agents can elevate human responders’ problem-solving skills to resolve partially-understood issues, faster and smarter. PagerDuty’s AI agents can instantly surface key information, like past or related incidents, to help guide responders to faster resolution.
• New and novel: s the story expands to new regions and introduces new characters and factions, more types of infected or even man-made threats emerge. Skill, ingenuity and instinct are key to overcoming those obstacles, just like responders’ unique expertise is core to resolving unknown or more complex incidents. In this scenario, AI agents play a supporting role, augmenting human knowledge with immediate contextual awareness and intelligent, automated insights.

When people and agents manage critical operations work together, teams can accelerate the operations lifecycle and redirect their focus from routine, repetitive tasks, toward innovation and strategic growth.

Lesson Two: Proactively listen to operational clicks

With every dangerous encounter, the survivors in The Last of Us heighten their senses to detect threats before they become deadly—the videogame even features a Listen Mode that enables Joel and Ellie to more effectively locate enemies.

Similarly, PagerDuty’s AI has been built over a decade of operational intelligence and billions of real incidents. With embedded machine learning, AI and automation in a single platform, PagerDuty AIOps cuts through the noise and acts as an early warning system to help teams resolve issues faster—or prevent them altogether. Here’s how:

• Minimal alert fatigue through intelligent capabilities that reduce noise by 91%.
• Automated resolution of common issues via event-driven automation that kicks off automated diagnostics and remediation where human intervention isn’t needed.
• Faster root cause analysis powered by intelligent correlation tools and AI agents.
• Improved operational visibility in a centralized console that surfaces time-critical incidents only and allows teams to take immediate action.

By reducing alert noise, improving incident visibility through ML-powered correlation, and enabling automated resolution through event-driven workflows, teams can shift from reactive to proactive, preventing costly incidents.

Lesson Three: Build situational awareness

In the world of The Last of Us, the ability to rapidly gather and interpret disparate pieces of intelligence can mean the difference between life and death. Teams dealing with time-sensitive operations know this: while navigating complex systems, vast amounts of data need to be scanned and correlated to accurately determine how to restore critical services.

This is where PagerDuty’s genAI comes into play: during critical incidents, it connects the dots across tools and incidents to proactively surface operational context and insights, turning data overload into intelligent action. PagerDuty’s genAI enables teams to resolve faster, work more efficiently, and make better decisions by:

• Surfacing relevant context at every step of the incident lifecycle, directly from Slack or Microsoft Teams, reducing cognitive load.
• Generating drafts for persona-based status updates to keep stakeholders aligned.
• Summarizing the most important results from running automation jobs to support informed decision-making.  
• Constructing common automation jobs with ease to automate more, faster.

Like in The Last of Us, the key to survival in modern operations isn’t just having information—it’s having it at the right time, presented in a way that enables quick, confident action. With PagerDuty’s AI, teams can navigate complex operations with the same situational awareness that keeps our favorite apocalypse survivors alive.

Lesson Four: Pick a trusted companion

Trust is hard-earned in both The Last of Us’s post-apocalyptic world and in critical operations. Would you trust your life with an experienced survivor or a newcomer? Joel needed time to warm up to his guardian role toward Ellie, and unproven, incomplete AI solutions may not have what it takes to safeguard your business continuity today.

PagerDuty’s AI, however, is an experienced player ready to hit the ground running. Over a decade, we’ve seen it all while helping customers from all sizes and industries to transform their critical operations, including nearly 70% of the Fortune 100 companies:

• Data and domain expertise: Trained on billions of real incidents over 15 years, our AI is battle-tested and purpose-built to take action when it matters most.
• Enterprise-grade security: Built-in guardrails ensure our AI operates within secure protocols, keeping hallucinations in check and enabling customers to deploy automation with confidence.
• Immediate time to value: PagerDuty AI requires no training or new infrastructure. It simply delivers real results powered by real-world data.
• Unified AI ecosystem: Just as Ellie and Joel must learn to work alongside other survivors and communities, PagerDuty integrates with 700+ tools in a single, intelligent platform to drive impact across your entire tech stack.

Building operations that thrive, not just survive

Just as Ellie and Joel’s world evolved from mere survival to building a sustainable future in a hostile environment, modern operations should move beyond basic incident response and a keeping-the-lights-on narrow mentality. PagerDuty’s AI-first platform transforms the way critical operations are done, empowering teams to:

• Get time back to innovate more, faster, accelerating business growth
• Enhance decision-making with intelligent context to reduce operating costs and complexity
• Build and sustain operational resilience to mitigate the risk of failure
• Foster continuous learning to keep improving operations and delivering exceptional customer experiences

This is how the modern enterprise can anticipate, overcome and learn from incidents—not just survive them.

Ready to redefine what’s possible for your operations and get ahead on what’s next? Discover how PagerDuty’s AI-first Operations Cloud platform can help you build operational resilience at scale. Visit pagerduty.com/ai to learn more about our battle-tested AI capabilities or request a demo today.