AI SRE

The AI SRE space is, as of the time of writing, absolutely insane. At some point in 2025, I counted the number of players and the amount of money rushing into the space - it was 20+ and over a billion dollars, if you included all funding numbers I’d found plus the numbers of incumbents in e.g. Cloud talking about how much they were going to invest in the space. It may well turn out to be one of those situations where it’s easy to make a prima-facie argument that the problem space is big, almost everyone “suffers from it”, and that it’s easy to make progress (given the current state of agentic development, etc etc), but it’s quite hard to deliver something that actually makes a difference and more importantly that is not like everyone else’s three foundational models in a trenchcoat.

Earlier in my career there were very similar conversations about mobile phone providers (really operators), who quickly became seen as being essentially commodotised - everyone would pick from a similar set of network gear provided by a small set of manufacturers, the handsets were mostly commodotised etc, etc. Ultimately they did what a lot of businesses in similar positions did, which is to attempt to differentiate themselves on price, branding/marketing, or customer service. There may well be a similar effect playing out in this market too.

In unrelated events, I see that Komodor are organising an AI SRE summit and that looks like an interesting speaker list, though I wonder precisely how vendor neutral that’s going to be.