I get asked this question a lot: 'Is AI going to replace SREs?' Short answer: no. Long answer: AI is changing what SREs spend their time on, and the SREs who adapt will have a huge edge.
What AI is actually good at in SRE workflows
1. First-pass triage. AI can look at 50 alerts and tell you the 5 most likely to be related to an ongoing incident. Beats manual correlation every time.
2. Log summarization. 100,000 log lines into a 20-line summary highlighting anomalies. The summary isn't always right, but it's a starting point.
3. Runbook generation. Given an alert type and historical incidents, AI can draft a runbook. You edit it; you don't write from scratch.
