PagerDuty in the second quarter of this year will add generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents to its IT operations platform, including one that functions as a site reliability engineer (SRE).
At the same time, PagerDuty is also repacking its incident management add-on to that platform to create a single premium tier that provides access to AI capabilities.
Jeffrey Hausman, chief product development officer for PagerDuty, said the Spring 25 release of the platform provides the framework IT operations teams need to orchestrate multiple AI agents.
In total, there are two additional AI agents being made available. An Operations Analyst identifies patterns that help IT teams become more efficient, while an Agentic Scheduler will dynamically change on-call schedules to ensure IT teams always have someone available to respond to an incident.
Additionally, PagerDuty is also making available a curated repository of field-tested AI prompts, with relevant integrations, that are based on PagerDuty Advance, a set of AI models that can be invoked via the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Those integrations now include Slack AI Assistant, the Zoom video conferencing platform and Amazon Q Business, a set of AI agents that automate a wide range of workflows.
Collectively, these capabilities will enable IT operations teams to improve the experience of end users by significantly reducing meantime-to-resolution (MTTR) in an era where IT environments continue to become increasingly more complex to manage, said Hausman.
It’s not clear to what degree IT operations teams are embracing AI to automate tasks, but it’s apparent the fundamental economics of IT management are changing. An IT staff will be able to more effectively manage IT operations at levels of scale that a short while ago might have seemed unimaginable. Some organizations might take advantage of AI to reduce the headcount of their IT organizations but just as many, if not more, are likely to deploy more applications than ever. Arguably, the most limiting factor when it comes to deploying more applications has been the shortage of IT personnel that organizations could afford to hire to manage it all.
The challenge, of course, is the initial investment required and the re-engineering of workflows that will be inevitably required to just a return on that investment. At the same time, however, it’s not likely AI will replace the need for IT administrators outright. In fact, if anything, the best IT talent will migrate to the organizations that provide them with the tools that reduce as much as possible the current level of toil they experience.
Arguably, one of the major reasons there is so much turnover in the ranks of IT organizations is that many of the manual tasks are simply too monotonous for people to want to perform daily over the lifespan of a career. IT professionals may not want to have their job eliminated by AI, but by the same token they would just as soon see many of the tasks they routinely perform today be automated.
As a result, it’s not so much whether AI will be applied to IT operations, so much as it is how soon and to what degree.
