In this BSA series – “Why AI?” – enterprise software leaders explain in their own words how artificial intelligence (AI) is having a positive impact on individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. In this submission, PagerDuty Senior Vice President & Chief Legal Officer Shelley Webb writes about how new generative AI capabilities allow PagerDuty to deliver the best service for its customers by saving time and resources.
1. Why AI?
At PagerDuty, we believe AI has the potential to provide extraordinary productivity gains. Of course, there is a responsibility that comes with working towards that goal, but that isn’t new to us. AI has been a foundational part of PagerDuty for years, using our rich dataset to help each customer modernize how they manage incidents by learning from their past data. The emergence of generative AI has unlocked a new set of capabilities we can deliver to our customers. Our goal remains the same – to help our customers spend less time “firefighting” and more time innovating and delighting their own customers.
With AI, our product offerings have evolved by leaps and bounds over the years – 15 years ago, we began with the simple concept of gathering the right people to address incidents quickly, and today the PagerDuty Operations Cloud uses AI to offer precision detection, prevention, and even self-healing of incidents. These engineering feats are predicated on a foundation of responsibly building and deploying technology that earns customer trust every day because there is little to no margin for error during mission-critical, time-sensitive work.
2. Can you give an example?
PagerDuty’s AIOps product is a great example of making people’s lives better by bringing order to chaos. Imagine you are on the IT team and you’re on call, meaning you are the individual expected to respond to an urgent service issue. You’re woken up in the middle of the night to address an incident, and suddenly more alerts start flooding in. AIOps helps reduce that noise – it groups similar alerts together into a single incident and routes that incident to the correct team.
From there, our AI provides additional context about the incident, helping speed up your understanding of what is wrong and how to triage it. Next, automated sequences kick-off, with AI suggesting actions to take – and maybe even resolving the incident entirely – so you can go back to sleep! PagerDuty’s AI gets better and better the longer a customer has been with PagerDuty. The more data we have in each customer’s unique environment, the better our AI-led approach gets.
Another recent example is the launch of PagerDuty Copilot assistant. Users get an operations copilot – essentially a digital assistant – that they can converse with using natural language and without leaving a chat tool. PagerDuty Copilot provides multiple AI-backed capabilities that help customers across the full spectrum of mission-critical operations work. Of PagerDuty Copilot’s capabilities, the ones that provide customers with immediate and substantial time savings get me the most excited.
One example is the “Catch Me Up” capability, giving users who join an ongoing incident the ability to instantly get oriented on what has happened so far. Anyone who has worked in operations knows how disruptive and time-consuming it can be to bring colleagues up to speed under the pressure of an ongoing incident. Another favorite capability of mine is the automated “Post-Mortem Draft.” Post-mortems are a best practice to ensure the team learns about what went wrong and how to avoid future incidents. However, this valuable activity doesn’t happen nearly enough; it’s so tempting to move onto the next incident as soon as the current incident has been resolved.
We can now use AI to automatically execute the previously time-consuming tasks of collecting relevant data and writing the first draft report, helping users focus their precious time on actually learning from the incident. When you connect this to our recent acquisition of Jeli.io – a company known for driving learning from incidents – the future looks exciting.
3. Where can we learn more?
- We encourage customers, partners, and others to read our Guidelines for the Safe and Secure Use of Generative AI to learn more about how we are continuously working to earn our customer’s trust as we advance the responsible use of AI within our company, products, and services.
- Information about PagerDuty Copilot, our generative AI-supported capabilities that are available in Early Access, is available here.
- You can always find information about PagerDuty and the problems that the Operations Cloud can help you solve here.
- All of our products are designed to help us deliver on our mission “To revolutionize operations and build customer trust by anticipating the unexpected in an unpredictable world.”
About the author:
Shelley Webb is Senior Vice President & Chief Legal Officer at PagerDuty, where she leads the legal, government affairs, and global impact teams. Before PagerDuty, she served in a variety of roles at Intel and practiced law at Williams & Connolly LLP.
