SRE Wasn't Invited to the AI Party

There is a significant disconnect between the push for AI adoption in leadership and its practical application within Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and infrastructure teams. While developers benefit from AI tools like Copilot for code completion and testing, SRE teams, whose work involves declaring desired states, orchestrating systems, and troubleshooting unique infrastructure challenges, find current AI tools largely unhelpful.

AI could make a difference in SRE by acting as intelligent agents that correlate logs, analyze metrics, and identify patterns during incident response, thereby reducing Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and demonstrating tangible business value, rather than focusing on traditional code-centric productivity metrics.