AI agents are entering incident response with powerful capabilities—detecting anomalies, summarizing logs, and suggesting fixes. Some even execute changes autonomously. The promise is compelling: fully autonomous resolution of production incidents in complex, constantly changing distributed systems.
But before we hand control to agents, we must ask a fundamental question: What kind of understanding must exist before we let agents act?
This talk argues that the real bottleneck is not model intelligence, but the absence of a continuously updated causal model of the system itself.
Co-Founder of Causely and former Engineering Director at Turbonomic (acquired by IBM), Endre has over 20 years of experience designing distributed data and runtime platforms. Before joining Turbonomic, he served as Vice President of Enterprise Systems Management at Goldman Sachs, leading large-scale infrastructure and monitoring initiatives. Endre holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
