Earlier this week, while watching the State of the Union, I was reminded of a famous campaign line:

“It’s about the economy, stupid.”

The phrase wasn’t an insult to voters. It was an internal reminder: stop chasing noise. Focus on fundamentals.

I couldn’t shake the parallel. Because in AI SRE right now, we’re chasing the wrong headline. Everyone is talking about AI. Very few are talking about reliability. And that should make operators uncomfortable.

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The Story Being Sold

The AI SRE space is crowded. Funding announcements are loud. Demos are polished. The claims are ambitious:

• Autonomous incident response
• Replace your on-call
• AI runs production
• Never get paged again

But implicit in much of this messaging is a slippery slope narrative that vendors are sharing about SREs themselves.

“SREs are overwhelmed.” → “SREs are buried in toil.” → “SREs are too slow to keep up.” → “SREs are the bottleneck.”

The fallacy starts with truth. Modern systems are more complex than ever. Signals are fragmented. Cognitive load is real. But there’s a line between acknowledging pressure and diminishing the role.

When the value proposition becomes “remove the human”, you’re no longer talking about reliability. You’re talking about labor substitution. And those are not the same problem.

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Reliability Was Never a Speed Problem

If reliability were simply about reacting faster, we would have solved it years ago.

We have monitoring. We have automation. We have runbooks. We have playbooks. We have no shortage of data. And yet incidents persist. Why?

Because reliability is not fundamentally about action. It is about understanding.

The best SRE teams are not valuable because they move quickly. They are valuable because they:

• Develop shared operational context across teams
• Understand second-order effects before acting
• Distinguish correlation from causation under pressure
• Know when automation is safe — and when it is dangerous

Automation without understanding doesn’t produce reliability. It produces faster mistakes. Speed without context increases blast radius. That isn’t progress.

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The Thin Wrapper Problem

Let’s be honest about something uncomfortable.

A large portion of what is being marketed as “AI SRE” today is a thin wrapper around a general-purpose language model.

Telemetry in. Summary out. Hypothesis generated.

That can be useful. But summarization is not operational understanding. Correlation alone is not root cause analysis. And generating plausible explanations is not the same thing as being accountable for production systems.

Reliability is a discipline built on trust, feedback loops, and consequences. It is earned slowly and lost quickly. 

If your AI cannot explain its reasoning in a way experienced operators trust — and cannot improve within the specific operational model of an environment — it is a tool. Not a teammate. And certainly not a replacement.

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The Picture They Paint of You

I recently came across a blog post called “The Picture They Paint of You.” It’s written by an SRE giving their opinion about the AI SRE space. It’s worth reading.

It forces you to ask a simple question: How do vendors describe the people they sell to?

If a company consistently frames SREs as inefficient, replaceable, or in the way of progress, that framing is not accidental. It reveals their worldview.

Do they see operators as experts to augment? Or as friction to remove?

That distinction will show up in the architecture, the product decisions, and the failure modes.

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Pop the AI Bubble

AI absolutely belongs in SRE. But we need to be clear about what problem it is solving.

If the goal is to:

• Reduce cognitive load
• Accelerate investigation
• Preserve and compound operational knowledge
• Increase confidence before action

Then AI can meaningfully improve reliability.

If the goal is to eliminate humans from the loop because “models are faster,” then we are optimizing for the wrong outcome.

Reliability is not a demo. It is not a product category.

It is an operational outcome that determines whether businesses stay online. That deserves more seriousness than a thin AI veneer.

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Challenge Us

If you’re evaluating AI SRE vendors — including Ciroos — don’t ask how advanced the model is.

Ask:

• How does your system build operational understanding over time?
• How do you prevent confident but wrong actions?
• Where does human judgment remain decisive?
• What does your product assume about the role of an SRE?
• Do you fundamentally respect the discipline of reliability engineering?

In the end, it comes down to one word.

Reliability.

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Want to Go Deeper?

Ciroos recently hosted a webinar titled “Reliability in the Age of AI” featuring a thoughtful and experienced panel. The discussion was moderated by Chirag Mehta, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, and included SRE leaders Niall Murphy and Todd Underwood, alongside Ronak Desai, CEO and Co-Founder of Ciroos.

It wasn’t a product demo. It was a discussion with experienced operators about what the “R” in reliability actually means when AI enters the picture.

They talked about:

• Where operational understanding breaks down
• Why speed without context increases risk
• How AI can reinforce — not replace — SRE judgment

You can watch the recording here:
👉 https://ciroos.ai/webinar-reliability-in-the-age-of-ai

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