In this BSA series – “AI@Work” – enterprise software leaders explain in their own words how artificial intelligence (AI) is having a positive impact on people’s jobs and the workforce. In this submission, BSA Board Member and PagerDuty’s Chief Legal Officer Shelley Webb talks about how employees are using AI in their jobs and how leaders should approach incorporating AI into their own workstreams.
What is your AI@Work?
For years, PagerDuty has harnessed the power of AI to help our customers anticipate, resolve, and prevent incidents, like IT outages, from disrupting their business. Customers using our AI products range from Fortune 100 enterprises to universities, hospitals, small businesses, government agencies, and everything in between – all of whom need to stay online and recover quickly when incidents arise.
Because there is little to no margin for error during the mission-critical, time-sensitive work of incident management, we’ve embraced AI innovation with the same core value that has guided our product development since our origins – customer trust.
Customer trust is earned. In July 2024, a global IT outage affected millions of individuals and thousands of businesses, and has been estimated by some sources to have cost US companies over $5.4 billion. PagerDuty customers who were more operationally mature recovered over 60% faster – and their usage of AI functionality increased by as much as 87% during the incident to help them resolve it and return to their normal course of work.
AI is one of the tools that PagerDuty harnesses to help its customers increase their operational maturity. For example, PagerDuty customers can deploy AI to help group alerts to reduce redundant noise during an incident, allowing responders to stay focused on fixing the issue. They can also use AI features to help surface important information immediately, like if there is a probable origin of the incident, or if a similar incident has previously occurred.
What internal capabilities do people or companies need to harness the power of AI for their organization?
A smart, safe, and scalable approach to harnessing the power of AI starts with good governance. At PagerDuty, we built an AI governance framework that covers both how we think about incorporating AI into the products and services we offer our customers, as well as how our own employees use AI internally.
Our AI governance council drives oversight of AI development and usage. The council consists of senior executives across a range of disciplines, from visionary technologists to legal, security, product, and IT experts. We meet regularly with team members throughout the company working on new products and features, as well as those assessing internal AI tools, to help us assess and manage AI risks. The AI governance council meetings are some of my favorite meetings – from staying current on the latest legal and regulatory developments to hearing what customers are asking for as they use our AI-based products – there is always something engaging on the agenda.
Core elements of our governance program include the following:
- Educating ourselves on the risks, opportunities, and legal and regulatory requirements involving AI
- Developing guiding principles, policies, and procedures for our employees – and educating employees on them
- Building in checkpoints to ensure we continuously and proactively adapt as laws, regulations, and customer needs evolve
How will AI@Work change how people do their jobs, and how should we prepare?
Our Generative AI capabilities – which we released earlier this year under the name PagerDuty Advance – were designed to help people do their jobs better and faster. PagerDuty Advance focuses on leveraging Generative AI for things AI does best – such as quickly processing large amounts of information – to keep humans focused on the judgment and decision-making humans do best. A few examples: PagerDuty Advance can help people distill data and coordinate with others more rapidly, obtain relevant context to make more informed decisions, and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
Imagine you’ve suddenly been brought into a Microsoft Teams or Slack channel in which people are working to resolve an IT outage, and you need to get up to speed on what has happened so far. You can interact with the PagerDuty Advance bot directly from the channel and ask questions like “What happened?” to understand the context of the incident, or “What’s changed?” to understand if any recent code changes might have caused the incident. Asking the bot these questions saves time and reduces the risk that a person will make an inadvertent error in updating you. If you need to send an update on the incident to impacted customers, you can use the Status Update feature to generate a draft with just a couple clicks, helping you keep your customers updated in a timely fashion.
If you’re in charge of a team that manages incident response, you probably need to analyze data to help you understand how quickly your team is acknowledging and resolving incidents, so that you can help your team consistently raise the bar on their performance and efficiency. PagerDuty Advance Analytics are captured in a dashboard that is automatically updated daily, to help you measure progress and trends on key data and metrics.
Something I love about the origin story of these product offerings is that some of them started as ideas PagerDuty employees wanted to develop for ourselves, in our own work. So while we offer these products to our customers today, the PagerDuty employees who serve as responders during incidents drove the demand to ask a bot to catch them up on recent events and context. Using our product internally provides valuable insights into how it performs in real-life scenarios, which helps us test, learn, and refine the offering for our customers. With AI, like any other product, using it yourself is immensely valuable – and rewarding.
What are some key takeaways for leaders using or planning to use AI@Work?
First, put in place a governance framework. Identify who in your company will decide on the company’s approach to responsible development and use of AI, and who will take responsibility to implement policies, educate employees, and iterate as needs evolve. When you have the right people serving on a governing body, your overall AI approach will start to take shape in a coherent fashion aligned with your company’s goals and values – and your customer’s needs.
Second, understand the what and the why. What are you looking to achieve with AI? What tasks in your business can AI do best, and what insights and decisions will humans make best? What are your customers asking for – and alternatively, what do they want to avoid – and why? When we first made our generative AI capabilities available in Early Access, we listened to customer input that they wanted to choose whether or not to turn features on for their users. PagerDuty addressed this request by deploying our generative AI capabilities in an “off” mode so that customer admins could affirmatively decide to turn them on. We applied this same concept in our PagerDuty Advance product launch to ensure that customers have a choice – either by purchasing a generative AI SKU or by admin enablement. This is one example of us staying true to our ultimate “why” – earning customer trust.
Third, in nearly anything I do, I find that it helps to develop North Star principles that will guide action. For example, if you decide as a company that transparency and customer choice will be essential elements of your company’s AI-based offerings, that decision streamlines the process of answering various questions that could arise down the road. Principles help you move faster while staying true to your values. In developing principles, don’t forget about your own internal use of AI – e.g., how do you feel about training large language models (LLMs) on company confidential data?
That’s just a starting point, but so far, it has steered us in a direction that has allowed us to embrace the spirit of innovation that has been a hallmark of our company since its founding, while ensuring we continue to operate as responsible stewards of a product that our customers rely on to help them get through their worst, most unpredictable days.
About the author:
Shelley Webb is 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.