AI SRE: what is it, how could it change on-call – and does it work?

Before we start: I’m in San Francisco this week and also next week. On Wed, 4 November, I’m hosting The Pragmatic Engineer Unplugged at the iconic SFJazz Club, featuring a rare conversation with Diogo Almeida (creator of Jev & co-inventor of ChatGPT), and Bryan Cantrill (cofounder and CTO of Oxide). It’s free to attend with registration, sign up here.

Wednesday, 4 November in SFJazz: The Pragmatic Unplugged. RSVP here

In May 2025 at Microsoft’s annual BUILD conference, the tech giant introduced “Azure SRE Agent” with an onstage demo in which an alert fired and the AI SRE Agent went to work on identifying the root cause, and then shipped a fix, all without having to wake up a human dev oncall.