Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The rapid pace of modern software development, fueled by AI-driven coding and accelerated deployment cycles, has resurfaced a challenge that many development teams already struggled with: the speed of incident response must now match the speed of change. Every day, teams ship code faster than ever, which inevitably increases the risk of a new issue making it to production. The traditional approach—where engineers waste time jumping between disconnected tools—is no longer sustainable.

Modern SRE teams face an overwhelming challenge: too many signals, too little time. Incidents are faster, systems are more complex, and reliability targets only get stricter. What if you had a teammate who could jump in instantly—context-aware, tireless, and armed with your runbooks, metrics, and alert data? Introducing PagerDuty’s SRE Agent, the next evolution in AI-driven operations.

New models, new agents, new capabilities. It seems like every week there’s a new must-have AI function. It’s no surprise that leaders are feeling pressure to move quickly. At a PagerDuty on Tour event, a customer joked that they couldn’t fathom having a five-year AI strategy; it makes way more sense to have a five-minute one. There’s truth in that comment.

For years, our annual State of Digital Operations report has been the industry benchmark for understanding how organizations manage incidents, build resilience, and evolve their operational practices. Each year, we survey hundreds of business and operations leaders worldwide to capture the challenges, priorities, and emerging practices shaping digital operations.

Shipping velocity has never been faster, but reliability can’t be the trade-off either. For engineering leaders, deploying AI for operations is no longer optional. The question is whether you’ll lead the transformation or fall behind. The hard truth? Organizations can’t keep relying on humans as the first line of defense. Not when the pace of shipping has never been faster. It’s simply not scalable.

If you’ve been eyeing chat-native incident tools and wondering whether PagerDuty can compete in Slack, this one’s for you. Are you still treating your incident management platform like a glorified pager? It’s time for an update. Over the past months, we’ve been evolving our Slack app from a notification tool into a full incident command center, and we’re coming for the chat-native tools (ahem, incident.io).

For engineering organizations running on PagerDuty, on-call schedules are sacred. When P0 incidents happen, you need your best engineers focused and ready, not getting scheduled to conduct an interview they’ll have to decline. For years, recruiting teams have been playing a manual game of Tetris, cross-referencing on-call rotations against interviewer availability every single time they book a technical screen or panel.