When a system goes down, the impact isn’t just technical. It’s the people in the center of it who adapt, improvise, apply their judgment, and keep the business moving forward. 

I’ve worked in operations for more than 25 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that in any system, it’s the humans who are the truly resilient part. When it comes to incident response, I believe that the next wave of AI-powered automation will free at-capacity teams to focus on high-impact, human-centered work. 

This, in turn, will deliver a better experience for everyone involved in an incident, whether it’s stakeholders seeking clarity, SREs doing triage, or users waiting for a resolution.

Already, organizations are seeing this impact. At a recent PagerDuty on Tour event in San Francisco, I had a chance to ask industry leaders where they see automation and AI making the biggest difference. Across verticals and roles, three things kept coming up: context-gathering, stakeholder communications, and user experience. 

Here’s what some of those leaders told me. The full presentations are available to watch on the PagerDuty on Tour site. 

Automation will reduce context-gathering during incidents

Anyone who’s been in an SRE’s shoes knows the feeling: It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve just received an urgent alert. But before you can start resolving the issue, you need to dig for context. 

Getting the right data takes time, which delays you from getting to work. The result is that important metrics, like mean time to restore (MTTR), suffer. Outages last longer, and their impact—financial, reputational, legal—is more deeply felt.

Automating context-gathering work helps SREs bring their judgment and expertise to an incident faster. They can assess the problem and restore the incident sooner. Most importantly, they can do it all with less manual work, less stress, and less risk of burnout.  

Mikhail Malamud, General Manager at CloudAware, put it to me this way: “If there is an incident, I would say about seventy, seventy-five percent of the time, something has changed. How do we know what it was? Was it a firewall rule? Was it a code deployment? Was it a routing change? What we do today is to leverage AI to find out what that change was.”

Here’s how it could work: The checkout service at an eCommerce site is timing out. Agentic AI references past incidents and contemporary event data to diagnose the issue and recommend several potential remediations. Then, it Slacks this information to a human SRE, who reviews it, traces the issue back to a recent code change, and initiates the rollback, restoring service before the incident escalates.

At TD Bank, Head of Enterprise Monitoring Chris Conklin has already begun seeing the benefits of using AI for context-gathering. “It helps us drive the right acuity to the right events,” he told me. “That helps us drive the right results.”

Automation will improve stakeholder communications

SREs aren’t the only people who need information in the middle of an incident. Another thing that kept coming up in my conversations was just how much time organizations were saving by using AI to tailor stakeholder communications. 

All parties need accurate, timely updates. Users want to know when service will be restored. Leadership wants to know the business impact. Other teams want to know how they’ll be impacted. Without AI, this responsibility falls to SREs, pulling them away from resolving the problem.

But different audiences often require the same answer in different levels of detail and tailored to different levels of technical understanding. 

Mikhail at CloudAware mentioned this was a major burden for his team. “[Stakeholders] all want to know what’s going on. When are we fixing this? What’s the root cause? What’s the ETA?” he told me. “Agentic AI can meet them where they are.”

With AI-powered comms, the right information goes to the right person at the right time, with less manual work for the SRE.

Sam Brinley, New York Life Insurance’s CVP, Enterprise Cloud Solution Architect and Engineer, anticipates similar benefits as his team adopts PagerDuty’s AI for stakeholder communications: “We have five communications that go out to the same audience. PagerDuty is helping us cut down on that. We’ll be able to catch people up, prioritize it properly, route it properly—it should really help us optimize incident management.”

Automation will improve the user experience

Often, the difference between a seamless interaction and a frustrating one comes down to how quickly an organization can recover from an incident. 

“Everybody is going to have incidents,” Malamud told me. “It’s just part of life… What customers will remember is how they were treated.”

For Conklin, this is central to the customer relationship at TD Bank. Every second saved in restoring service reduces the risk of failed transactions, protects account access, and preserves the confidence customers place in the bank. “We have to instill the trust within our customers, and the way we do that is through rapid response,” he said.

I believe the next wave of AI-powered automation will enable that response by shrinking the gap between a problem and its resolution. For simple incidents, this may involve an AI agent resolving the issue automatically (and saving the SRE a midnight alert). For more complex issues, humans can step in with the context they need to act quickly and effectively. 

The result is that incidents that once caused noticeable delays or service failures are addressed before they can erode trust. Businesses avoid the expense and reputational loss that comes with a lengthy outage. Customers get service that is steady, dependable, and available. 

As Conklin put it, “We are leveraging [automation] in any way possible… because we know it leapfrogs us into building even more trust.”  

What’s even more exciting is that the impact of this isn’t limited to just incident response. When incidents take up less of everyone’s time, there’s more time to spend on the important things: connecting with the people who matter. 

Daniel Brusilovsky, Vice President of Technology at the Golden State Warriors, sees automation as key to delivering better experiences. “If we can spend more time engaging with our fans and creating personalized customer experiences, that’s a huge win for us. And that’ll ultimately help us drive more revenue.” 

How to prepare for the next wave

For me, the biggest takeaway from our Pager Duty on Tour events is that AI-powered automation gives humans the space to think critically and solve problems creatively. 

By speeding up context-gathering and tailoring stakeholder communication, AI and automation help teams operate at their best. This delivers a more reliable experience for the end user and, ultimately, reduces the business impact of incidents.

Organizations that embrace this shift will build stronger relationships with stakeholders, employees, and customers alike. If you’d like a closer look at how the human-agent partnership can transform your organization, check out our eBook, The Human + Agent Partnership Model.