Every SRE knows the feeling. An alert goes off, Slack lights up, dashboards are everywhere, and suddenly everyone is trying to answer the same questions: What changed? Is this related? What’s the safest thing to do next? We’ve become very good at detecting incidents, but responding to them is still surprisingly manual. We jump between logs, deployments, monitoring tools, CI/CD pipelines, cloud consoles, and runbooks, piecing the story together under pressure. In this talk, I’ll share why I believe the next step for incident response isn’t another dashboard or another AI chatbot—it’s systems that can investigate alongside engineers, connect the dots across different sources, explain what they found, and recommend (or even safely carry out) the right action under clear operational guardrails. We’ll look at what this future could look like, the engineering challenges behind it, and why trust, governance, and human oversight are just as important as intelligence if we’re going to automate production operations responsibly.
Paschal Ifediora is an engineer and founder of Scrubbe, an autonomous incident response platform for engineering teams. He’s passionate about distributed systems, reliability engineering, AI agents, and building systems that help engineers spend less time firefighting and more time building. His work focuses on making incident response faster, safer, and easier through intelligent automation.
