Reliability from Manual to Autopilot

“AI SRE” is everywhere right now — but what does it actually mean to automate reliability, and how far can we really take it?

In this talk from Cloud Native Karlsruhe, I break down the hype around AI SRE by comparing it to a discipline that has already gone through decades of automation: autonomous driving. Just like cars combine deterministic systems (anti-lock brakes, gearboxes) with AI-driven ones (adaptive cruise control, lane keeping), reliability engineering needs the same nuanced mix — not a single LLM doing everything.

Topics covered:

• Why “AI SRE” oversimplifies incident response vs. the full scope of SRE work
• The five levels of automation: manual, scripted, linear, conditional, and high automation
• Lessons from autonomous driving applied to reliability engineering
• Instrumentation, auto-remediation, and where LLMs genuinely help (and where they don’t)
• A look at the CNCF Technical Advisory Group’s in-progress white paper on operational resilience

Slides of this talk are available at ai-sre-talk.vercel.app.