Developers got disrupted by AI. They shrugged. SREs are next. They're terrified. The difference: a Copilot mistake is reverted in seconds. An autonomous AI system making remediation decisions in production is irreversible. One breaks a function. The other breaks trust in your infrastructure. But the real fear runs deeper. SREs have spent years building muscle memory around their systems—understanding failure modes, owning the reliability narrative. AI tooling promises to abstract that away. Use our platform. Upload your metrics. Trust our models. Your data lives in our cloud. Let us handle it. That's not autonomy. That's surrender. This talk cuts through the noise. We'll walk through why SRE fear of AI is rational, not paranoid. Why the current wave of 'AI SRE tools' are built for vendors, not operators. And why regulation (GDPR, data residency, compliance) is actually the key to building AI systems that SREs will adopt. The move: AI that lives where your systems live. On your infrastructure. Your data stays yours. Full transparency into every decision. Gradual autonomy—from suggest to execute-with-approval to autonomous. Built for regulated industries from day one. When privacy and control are baked in, AI stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you build. That's when SREs stop being scared and start being dangerous.
Co-Founder & CEO of RubixKube. Building autonomous operating systems for production. CNCF member, Kubernetes maintainer. Spent years watching SREs get buried under tooling and constraint. Now building the opposite: one intelligent operating layer that learns systems permanently instead of asking humans to remember. Previously at yellow.ai and Avesha. Go. Causal graphs. Agents that don't hallucinate in production.
