As the world turned its attention to Super Bowl LX, PagerDuty joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the National Football League (NFL) for a timely conversation on what it takes to operate when failure is not an option.

Moderated by Rima Olinger, Director of Amazon Quick Suite, the event brought together leaders from DXC Technology, Asana, the NFL—and PagerDuty’s own David Williams, SVP of Product Development—to explore how AI agents, coordination, and real-time intelligence help organizations respond faster and stay resilient under the most demanding conditions.

When Failure Is Not an Option: Lessons from NFL Game-Day Operations

On game days, millions of fans, players, broadcasters, and partners rely on technology to work flawlessly, in real time. There are no replays for infrastructure. No second chances for systems. For Rama Ravindranath, VP of Football Technology at the NFL, operating at such a massive scale, under intense scrutiny, depends on three non-negotiables: reliability, speed, and swift coordination.

Reliability isn’t accidental, but engineered. Every system is monitored, every dependency is understood, every escalation path is rehearsed. Speed is possible because teams can quickly access data and understand it, and coordination is more important than heroics. Success isn’t about one person saving the day, but about sharing the right information with the right teams, so they can act decisively.

For modern enterprise operations, the parallel is clear: while most organizations aren’t running Super Bowl Sundays every week, their business continuity depends on delivering always on, always reliable, always fast services to their customers.

And just like AWS powers real-time NFL statistics, enabling split-second decisions that determine whether a team wins or loses, PagerDuty empowers digital operations teams with a real-time system of intelligence and action to quickly mitigate service disruption and protect the business. 

Data Access is the Game Changer

As David Williams, SVP of Product Development at PagerDuty, shared during the panel: while teams  work hard to keep their systems reliable, incidents will inevitably occur. It’s not if, it’s when. So how can we define operational excellence? It’s all in the ability to respond and recover quickly.

When something breaks, teams lose precious time gathering context. Those seconds and minutes of uncertainty are often the difference between a minor disruption and a major outage. And it doesn’t happen because companies lack data. It happens because that data is trapped—in documents, in scattered tools, or in someone’s head.

In other words: having data isn’t the game changer. Being able to quickly tap it, correlate it and understand it is. PagerDuty understands this like nobody else in the incident management space does.

The PagerDuty platform acts as a central nervous system for digital operations, connecting everything from monitoring and logs to developer tools and systems of record, and then orchestrating that data with AI and automation to drive faster, smarter decisions. What that means when issues hit production environments: PagerDuty analyzes the context and accelerates resolution, making intelligence and action work together seamlessly to keep operations running smoothly.

A Team Sport of Humans and AI

One of the strongest metaphors of the day came straight from the NFL: even the most talented athletes don’t win without well defined plays, rules, and coordination with their fellow players. The same is true for successful operations, especially when AI and AI agents are a part of them. 

Leading operations teams work alongside AI and AI agents, as teammates.  They understand AI can only succeed when organizations clearly define how humans and machines communicate, coordinate, and act together. When that structure is in place, teams are able to perform when it matters most.

At PagerDuty, we’ve been embedding AI into our platform for more than a decade, and that experience has reinforced a simple truth: AI accelerates outcomes best when it operates within well-defined workflows and guardrails. When agents are guided by clear rules of engagement, they can surface the right runbooks, connect signals across systems, and coordinate response at machine speed—while humans focus on judgment and strategy. Read more on how AI agents just got smarter thanks to PagerDuty and AWS

How PagerDuty and Amazon Quick Deliver Intelligent Operations

This philosophy comes to life through our active integration with Amazon Quick. Together, PagerDuty and Amazon Quick help teams move from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience across three core pillars:

1. Build an Intelligent Operations Hub

Operations teams waste critical minutes during incidents switching between fragmented tools. PagerDuty and Amazon Quick eliminate this friction by unifying real-time and historical incident data with context from 1,000+ Quick-connected applications, all accessible through a single natural-language interface. The result: less context switching, reduced cognitive load, and faster, more confident decision-making when it matters most. 

2. Accelerate Incident Response with Autonomous Workflows

Through agent-to-agent integration between Amazon Quick and PagerDuty’s AI agents, teams work together to accelerate incident triage, root cause analysis, and remediation – reducing manual toil and overhead. The outcome: incidents resolved in minutes, not hours.

3. Shift from Reactive to Preventative Operations

Amazon Quick Research analyzes historical PagerDuty incident data alongside deployments, code changes, and customer impact to uncover patterns and predict failures. This transforms incident history into operational intelligence, helping teams continuously improve resilience and prevent issues before customers feel the impact.

Watch this Lightning Talk session from AWS re:Inventto learn more.

The Winning Gameplay

Just like on game day, winning  at digital operations means seeing the field clearly, making fast decisions, and executing with precision, no matter how chaotic the moment.

At PagerDuty, together with AWS and Amazon Quick, that’s the future we’re building toward. Our focus is empowering teams with confidence, unlocking unified operational context, and automating the work that slows humans down.

Contact us to learn more or connect with your PagerDuty representative to get started.