We’re sold AI as magic. In a demo, it looks like exactly that. But the moment it leaves the slide deck and meets a real, paying customer, the truth gets a lot more uncomfortable — and reliability engineers feel it first. In this 10-minute talk, a 24-year-old founder shares the unfiltered reality of building on AI in production: why it predicts rather than understands (and confidently invents things that don't exist), why a working demo is nowhere near a working product, and why AI quietly breaks the core promise SREs are built on — predictability. Same input, different output. No clean stack trace for "the model got dumber today." No obvious way to write an SLO for correctness or roll back a silent degradation. No hype, no fear-mongering — just the brutal, practical truth about where AI genuinely shines, where it lies to you, and why the future belongs to the people who understand exactly where it breaks.
Santosh Kumar Thota: Founder and CEO of Jatayuv.ai, Santosh Kumar Thota is an entrepreneur, AI mentor, and startup advisor focused on applying AI to real-world challenges. He is building AI-powered travel solutions, mentors students and early-career professionals, and actively supports the startup ecosystem through education, content creation, and community initiatives. Ravindar Kothapally: Senior SRE with 14+ years of enterprise IT experience across large-scale banking and financial systems — shares how the core principles of Site Reliability Engineering became the unexpected blueprint for building and scaling a successful EdTech business. Drawing from real production incidents, high-pressure war rooms, and the discipline of operating systems at 99.95% SLA, Ravindar walks through how SRE thinking — error budgets, blameless postmortems, observability, and structured incident response — directly shaped his decision to leave a stable corporate career and launch RKIT Labs full-time in January 2025. The session explores how SRE-inspired frameworks have been applied beyond engineering — driving operational reliability across sales pipelines, mentor quality SLAs, customer feedback loops, payment monitoring, and business growth metrics, enabling RKIT Labs to train and mentor thousands of IT professionals across India, USA, and Canada. In the final segment, Ravindar addresses the critical college-to-corporate skill gap facing today's engineering graduates, offering a practitioner's perspective on what industry actually demands versus what classrooms deliver — and how structured mentorship bridges that divide. This talk is equal parts technical, entrepreneurial, and motivational — designed for SRE practitioners at every stage who want to understand how reliability thinking scales far beyond the terminal
