You (and AI) can't automate reliability away

What if the hardest part of reliability has nothing to do with tooling or automation? Jennifer Petoff explains why real reliability comes from the human workflows wrapped around the engineering work.

Everyone seems to think AI will automate reliability away.

I keep hearing the same story:

“Our tooling will catch it.”

“Copilots will reduce operational load.”

“Automation will mitigate incidents before they happen.”

But here’s a hard truth to swallow: AI only automates the mechanical parts of reliability — the machine in the machine.

The hard parts haven’t changed at all.

You still need teams with clarity on system boundaries.You still need consistent approaches to resolution.You still need postmortems that drive learning rather than blame.

AI doesn’t fix any of that. If anything, it exposes every organizational gap we’ve been ignoring. And that’s exactly why I wanted today’s guest on.

Jennifer Petoff is Director of Program  Management for Google Cloud Platform and Technical Infrastructure education. Every day, she works with SREs at Google, as well as with SREs at other companies through her public speaking and Google Cloud Customer engagements.

Even if you have never touched GCP, you have still been influenced by her work at some point in your SRE career. She is co-editor of Google’s original Site Reliability Engineering book from 2016.