Harness Launches "Human-Aware" AI Agent to Automate Site Reliability Engineering

Harness has unveiled a new site reliability engineering agent designed to act as a human-aware partner during system failures. This AI SRE platform aims to reduce the time spent on incident response by connecting alerts directly to code changes and human insights. It marks a shift from tools that merely observe to agents that can actively investigate and resolve issues.

The system uses generative AI through a feature called AI Scribe to manage the high administrative cost of incidents. AI Scribe joins communication channels like Slack or Zoom to transcribe conversations and distinguish technical decisions from general chatter. It automatically generates a live incident timeline and final post-incident reports to ensure documentation compliance without manual effort.

Unlike typical AI companies that focus on metrics like CPU usage or latency, Harness leverages its position in the CI/CD pipeline. Its Change Intelligence feature correlates incidents with specific code deployments or feature flag toggles. This allows the AI to identify the root cause of an outage by pinpointing exactly what changed in the environment immediately before the failure occurred.

The agent is considered human-aware because it understands the social context of engineering teams. It manages on-call schedules and uses its knowledge of the codebase to route alerts to the specific developer who made the recent change. This prevents broad alert storms and ensures the right expert is notified from the first page.

Harness provides one-click remediation through automation runbooks that can be triggered directly from chat interfaces. Users can roll back deployments or toggle feature flags without switching between different management consoles. This integration of investigation and action sets it apart from legacy monitoring platforms that require external tools for fixing problems.

By automating the busy work of triage and documentation, Harness allows engineering teams to focus on solving complex architectural challenges. The platform works with existing stacks like Jira and GitHub via native integrations. For more information on the specific features and capabilities, visit the Harness AI SRE product page.