We analyzed 109,000 incidents from the public status pages of 392 companies, along with hundreds of published post-mortems. We started with resolution times and then went under the hood, classifying each incident by failure mode, root cause and the remediation the team applied. The result is one of the most detailed public pictures of how production systems fail and how teams recover them. It also shows that a team's own response practice explains three times more of its resolution time than its industry does. The data also shows how AI is changing incidents. AI-related incidents grew from under 2% of the total in 2023 to more than 10% in 2026. Incidents caused by AI agents acting on production systems are rising sharply this year. With AI coding pushing change volume higher every quarter, SRE teams will face much more change than current practice was designed to handle. In the second half of the talk, we describe where we believe SRE goes next. Faster incident response on its own won't keep pace. The focus has to shift from mitigation to prevention, and the mitigation that remains has to become autonomous. Reliability becomes part of an operations factory, in which agentic systems check each change against known failure modes before it ships and mitigate what still breaks within the team's SLOs. Agents can only do that with a world model of the systems they run and a safe place to test a fix before applying it. Today's service and context graphs map what is deployed and how it connects. A world model also needs intended state, change history, SLOs, upstream providers and the failure patterns from our research. The SRE becomes a reliability architect, who designs this system and decides what agents are allowed to act on. We'll also propose an autonomy index to track how much operational work agents carry and how well they do it. Attendees will leave with insights from the incident research and a roadmap toward autonomous SRE.
John Jamie is VP of Marketing at StackGen, where he leads the State of Reliability research program and the launch of StackGen's autonomous SRE capabilities. He has spent about a decade in cloud infrastructure and operations, including roles at Platform9 and at Sedai. StackGen is his second company working on autonomous operations. He presented the State of Reliability findings on LinkedIn Live in August, has spoken on SRE topics at SREday, and is a multi-time SREcon attendee.
Dharani Vijayakumar is Director of Product, Technical GTM at StackGen, where he leads product marketing and technical go-to-market for the Aiden agentic platform. Before rejoining StackGen this year, he worked on AI agents as Executive Director of Product Management for the Data and AI/ML platform at JPMorganChase. In an earlier role at StackGen, he launched a developer self-service AI agent for infrastructure. He has also held product management and engineering roles at HashiCorp, AWS and Cisco, including product work on HashiCorp Cloud Platform and AWS Lambda. He holds an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
