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Democratize Automation with AI-Generated Runbooks

by Ranjana Devaji August 31, 2023 | 4 min read

Operational efficiency is as critical within the IT and engineering teams as any other part of the business. Automating repetitive tasks and reducing escalations within and to these teams is of immense value.

While automation saves time and boosts productivity, the complexity of developing automation can be a limiting factor and bottleneck. Generative AI is a paradigm shift here, in that it brings consumer-style simplicity to assisting in the development of enterprise-grade automation.

With the new interface of generative AI, organizations can democratize automation and therefore increase the number of individuals that are contributing to authoring and harnessing automation.

To help our customers achieve their goals with automation, we are excited to announce public Early Access for AI-generated Runbooks. Starting today, Runbook Automation users can write the task they wish to automate in plain-English and let AI build a template of automation for that particular task.

AI-generated Runbooks lower the barrier to entry to new automation developers and speeds up the time to create new automation for experienced automation authors. This feature works seamlessly with the user’s preferred scripting language, offering a low-code solution for what used to be a high-code task.

Simply sign up for the PagerDuty Runbook Automation Trial if you are not an existing Runbook Automation user. For existing Runbook Automation customers, App administrators can enable this feature at any time.

Tangible Benefits from Leveraging AI-generated Runbooks

Better Development timelines

Are you a seasoned automation engineer? AI-generated runbooks will help you save time and effort.

Creating self-service automation for tasks involves sifting through documentation, identifying the right calls/commands, and then transposing them into individual job steps manually.
With AI-generated runbooks, authors can generate these on the fly and faster than ever before.

Here’s a quick look at what provisioning access to apps in Okta looks like with and without AI-generated Runbooks:

Faster Onboarding

Get good fast with example jobs for reference. Start with tasks you’re familiar with and see how these tasks operate within the Runbook Automation platform.

Democratize Technical Automation

With AI-generated Runbooks, less experienced automation-authors can quickly go from thought to development to implementation. This broadens the scope of people within an organization that can leverage a technical tool such as Runbook Automation.

Conquering Blank Slate Problems

A typical conundrum for users in the face of automation is “Where do I start?”. With AI-generated runbooks, users can now hit the ground running by creating baseline versions of Jobs for their variety of use cases.

Build with Best Practices for Optimal Results

The AI-generated Runbooks use fine-tuned “prompt engineering” that embeds the known best-practices from the engineers here on the Process Automation team at PagerDuty.
For example, all Jobs are created with a ReadMe that explains the prerequisites for invoking that Job. And all secrets used within the Job are retrieved from Key Storage – rather than requested from the user.

GenAI – Security & Data

A common concern we hear from our customers considering adopting generative AI is around the security of their data, and the potential of giving competitors advantages through model training. PagerDuty AI-generated runbooks feature is an opt-in, meaning you need to enable it to be able to use it.  Furthermore, as stated in the feature documentation:

The only data sent to the generative AI model is the text entered into the prompt field. No other data about your environment, existing Jobs or the source of the prompt is sent to the AI model. Furthermore, the AI model is not trained on the text entered into the prompt.

Read our Guidelines for the Safe and Secure Use of Generative AI to learn more about how we’re working with and building our AI-powered  features.

See AI-generated Runbooks in Action

 

AI-generated Runbooks propel automation into a new realm, where your operations are empowered like never before. Embrace the future of automation with PagerDuty, and witness the transformation it brings to your operational landscape.

Sign up for the PagerDuty Runbook Automation Trial today!