The Future of Platform Engineering: AI-Driven Operations

The Shift to AI Ops

Platform engineering is undergoing a paradigm shift. The traditional model of building internal developer platforms (IDPs) is being augmented by AI agents that can predict, diagnose, and resolve incidents before they impact customers.

From Dashboards to Decisions

We are moving away from "looking at dashboards" to "reviewing AI decisions". At Salesforce, we've implemented agents that don't just alert us to high CPU usage, but investigate the root cause—whether it's a memory leak, a noisy neighbor, or a legitimate traffic spike—and suggest or even execute remediation.

The Role of the SRE

Does this mean SREs are obsolete? Far from it. The SRE role is evolving into "AI Systems Architect". We are now responsible for:

2. Ensuring the observability data fed into models is clean and accurate.

3. Handling the complex "unknown unknowns" that AI cannot yet predict.

The future is autonomous, but human-directed.