Incident management is undergoing a transformation as businesses grapple with increasingly complex digital ecosystems. With the rise of hyperscalers, cultural shifts such as DevOps and now the disruptive potential of generative artificial intelligence, the landscape of enterprise technology is changing at breakneck speed.

Automation and advanced AI capabilities are enabling organizations to tackle challenges faster, extract actionable insights from vast data sets and streamline workflows — all while improving productivity and quality of life for workers. These innovations are not just reshaping operations, but redefining the very core of how businesses approach problem-solving in a hyperconnected world, according to Jennifer Tejada (pictured), chief executive officer of PagerDuty Inc.

PagerDuty’s Jennifer Tejada talks with theCUBE about automation in incident management.

“PagerDuty was built on AWS from the very early days, and in fact, our three co-founders started as Amazon software engineers … that’s where they found this big problem of needing to automate on-call and better address incidents and issues when they arrive,” Tejada said. “When we first built our original app, it was built in the Amazon cloud and we leveraged a lot of Amazon’s privatus to make it work, and they’ve continued to be a great technology partner, offering lots of different solutions that have enabled us to scale quickly but also reliably and securely.”

Tejada spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier for theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the transformation of incident management through advanced AI and automation is reshaping enterprise operations and problem-solving.

Streamlining incident management with AI and automation

PagerDuty was established to address a critical gap in managing on-call incidents, much like responding to emergencies in an ER, according to Tejada. As businesses transitioned to the cloud, the cultural shift toward DevOps placed accountability for production-quality code on developers themselves, leading to a need for stronger incident response tools.

“I’ve been at this for a long time, but when the smartphone really became smart, it changed a lot of things because suddenly you had a supercomputer in your pocket,” she said. “That opened up just a whole new world of possibilities for software engineers to develop applications that could change the way we live, the way we learn and the way we work.”

Fast forward to today, as the environment is undergoing another tectonic shift with generative AI. Much as cloud computing and DevOps revolutionized operations, AI is enabling companies to achieve greater efficiency, scalability and reliability. AI-driven tools now allow for quicker root-cause analyses, better incident triage and more effective resolution strategies.

“Big, major incidents are now on the rise,” Tejada said. “They’re up 43% year-over-year, and they cost nearly $1 million every time they happen because we all rely on technology for almost everything.”

PagerDuty’s innovations, such as the Operations Cloud, are reshaping digital operations, Tejada revealed. By embedding AI and machine learning into its core, PagerDuty has made it possible to manage incidents and automate mission-critical workflows in real time.

“We announced this summer PagerDuty Advance, which is our generative AI assistant,” she added. “It’s starting to take some of the toil out of the hands of our developers by being able to tell you what customers are impacted, what’s changed in the complexity of many deployments that happen over short periods of time. All those very quick, but high-fidelity answers are now available really easily and deeply integrated into chat experiences that our customers love.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage”:

Photo: SiliconANGLE