
At Harness, our story has always been about change ā helping teams ship faster, deploy safer, and control the blast radius of every modification to production. Deployments, feature flags, pipelines, and governance are all expressions of how organizations evolve their software.
Today, the pace of change is accelerating. As AI-assisted development becomes the norm, more code reaches production faster, often without a clear link to the engineer who wrote it. Now, Day 2 isnāt just supporting the unknown ā itās supporting software shaped by changes that may not have a clear human owner.
And as every SRE and on-call engineer knows, even rigorous change hygiene doesnāt prevent incidents because real-world systems donāt fail neatly. They fail under load, at the edges, in the unpredictable ways software meets traffic patterns, caches, databases, user behavior, and everything in between.
When that happens, teams fall back on what theyāve always relied on: Human conversation and deep understanding of what changed.
Thatās why today weāre excited to introduce the Harness Human-Aware Change Agent ā the first AI system designed to treat human insight as operational data and use it to drive automated, change-centric investigation during incidents.
Not transcription plus RCA. One unified intelligence engine grounded in how incidents actually unfold.
The Human-Aware Change Agent is part of Harness AI SRE ā a unified incident response system built to help teams resolve incidents faster without scaling headcount. AI SRE brings together the critical parts of response: capturing context, coordinating action, and operationalizing investigation.
At the center is the AI Scribe, because the earliest and most important clues in an incident often surface in conversation before they appear in dashboards. Scribe listens across an organizationās tools with awareness of the incident itself ā filtering out unrelated chatter and capturing only the decisions, actions, and timestamps that matter. The challenge isnāt producing a transcript; itās isolating the human signals responders actually use.
Those signals feed directly into the Human-Aware Change Agent, which drives change-centric investigation during incidents.
And once that context exists, AI SRE helps teams act on it: Automation Runbooks standardize first response and remediation, while On-Call and Escalations ensure incidents reach the right owner immediately.
AI SRE also fits into the tools teams already run ā with native integrations and flexible webhooks that connect observability, alerting, ticketing, and chat across systems like Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, and Teams.
Most AI approaches to SRE assume incidents can be solved entirely through machine signals ā logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, anomaly detectors. But if youāve ever been on an incident bridge, you know thatās not how reality works.
Some of the most important clues come from humans:
These early observations shape the investigation long before anyone pulls up a dashboard.
Yet most AI tools never hear any of that.
The Harness Human-Aware Change Agent changes this. It listens to the same conversations your engineers are having ā in Slack, Teams, Zoom bridges ā and transforms the human story of the incident into actionable intelligence that guides automated change investigation.
It is the first AI system that understands both what your team is saying and what your systems have changed ā and connects them in real time.
1. It listens and understands human context.
Using AI Scribe as its conversational interface, the agent captures operational signals from a teamās natural dialogue ā impacted services, dependencies, customer-reported symptoms, emerging theories or contradictions, and key sequence-of-events clues (āright beforeā¦ā).
The value is in recognizing human-discovered clues, and converting them into signals that guide next steps.
2. It investigates changes based on those clues.
The agent then uses these human signals to direct investigation across your full change graph including deployments, feature flags or config changes, infrastructure updates, and ITSM change records ā triangulating what engineers are seeing with what is actually changing in your production environment.
3. It surfaces evidence-backed hypotheses.
Instead of throwing guesses at the team, it produces clear, explainable insights:
āA deployment to checkout-service completed 12 minutes before the incident began. That deploy introduced a new retry configuration for the payment adapter. Immediately afterward, request latency started climbing and downstream timeouts increased.ā
Each hypothesis comes with supporting data and reasoning, allowing teams to quickly validate or discard theories.
4. It helps teams act faster and safer
By uniting human observations with machine-driven change intelligence, the agent dramatically shortens the path from:
What are we seeing? ā What changed? ā What should we do?
Teams quickly gain clarity on where to focus, whatās most suspicious, and which rollback or mitigation actions exist and are safest.
With this release, Harness is redefining what AI for incident management looks like.
Not a detached assistant. Not a dashboard summarizer. But a teammate that understands what responders are saying, investigates what systems have changed, connects the dots, and helps teams get to truth faster.
Because the future of incident response isnāt AI working alone. Itās AI working alongside engineers ā understanding humans and systems in equal measure.
Book a demo of Harness AI SRE to see how human insight and change intelligence come together during real incidents.
ā


At SREday NYC 2026, the ShipTalk podcast welcomed Leon Adato, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at Cribl and host of the Technically Religious podcast, for a conversation about how engineers navigate failure and uncertainty in complex systems.
In the episode, ShipTalk host Dewan Ahmed, Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, spoke with Leon about finding lessons for reliability engineering in unexpected placesāincluding movies like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
For Leon, the world of SRE is full of moments that feel like plot twists: systems fail, vendors disappear, and tools that once seemed essential suddenly become obsolete.
The key is not avoiding those momentsābut learning how to respond to them.
Leon often draws parallels between technology and storytelling, and one of his favorite examples comes from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
In the movie, Miles Morales struggles to control his powers because he is overwhelmed by pressure. At one point he literally gets stuck to a ceiling because he cannot relax.
Leon sees that moment as a perfect metaphor for engineers during a production incident.
When systems break and the pressure is high, engineers can become overwhelmed by the situation. That stress can make it harder to think clearly and move forward.
Just like Miles learning to trust himself, SREs often need to pause, refocus, and trust their experience to navigate a difficult outage.
Leonās talk at SREday focused on a scenario many engineers eventually face: watching a technology choice fail.
Sometimes the failure comes from a vendor implosion.
Sometimes the product simply becomes obsolete.
Sometimes the tool just doesnāt live up to its promises.
In those moments, engineers may feel like the decision reflects badly on them.
But Leon argues that these situations often produce valuable outcomes.
When a tool collapses or a platform fails, teams are forced to rethink assumptions, improve architecture, and make better decisions moving forward.
What initially feels like a disaster can become an opportunity to build stronger systems and stronger teams.
Another theme Leon emphasized is the importance of owning failures openly.
When something breaks, engineers can respond in very different ways. Some people try to hide the issue or shift blame. Others acknowledge the problem and focus on fixing it.
Leon believes the second approach leads to healthier engineering cultures.
Reliability engineering depends on transparency. Systems fail, and the best teams treat those moments as opportunities to learn rather than something to hide.
Owning the glitch helps organizations improve their systemsāand helps engineers grow in the process.
Leon Adatoās message for SREs is simple but powerful.
Technology will always change. Tools will come and go. Systems will occasionally fail.
What matters most is how engineers respond to those moments.
Staying calm during outages, learning from failed technology choices, and approaching problems with honesty and humility are what ultimately make teams stronger.
And sometimes, a good lesson in reliability engineering can even come from a superhero movie.
Enjoy conversations like this with engineers, platform builders, and reliability leaders from across the industry.
Follow ShipTalk on your favorite podcast platform and stay tuned for more stories from the people building the systems that power modern technology. šļøš


At SREday NYC 2026, the ShipTalk podcast welcomed Birol Yildiz, Co-founder and CEO of ilert, for a conversation about the next evolution of incident response.
In the episode, ShipTalk host Dewan Ahmed, Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, spoke with Birol about how artificial intelligence is transforming reliability engineeringāfrom simply assisting engineers during incidents to autonomously diagnosing and resolving outages.
For many SRE teams, the goal has always been clear: fewer late-night pages and faster recovery times. According to Birol, the next wave of tooling may finally make that possible.
For years, AI tools in operations have focused mainly on post-incident assistanceāsummarizing alerts, analyzing logs, or helping generate incident reports.
But Birol believes the industry is now moving beyond that stage.
Instead of just helping engineers understand what happened, AI SRE agents are beginning to actively resolve incidents in real time.
These systems ingest signals from multiple sources, including:
By correlating these signals, an AI agent can detect the root cause of an outage and automatically execute remediation stepsāoften within minutes.
The result is a dramatic shift in incident response.
Rather than waking up engineers with alerts in the middle of the night, the system can often resolve the issue first and present a clean incident report afterward.
One of the biggest challenges for SREs during incidents is context switching.
Engineers typically jump between multiple tools to investigate problems:
Each system provides only part of the picture.
According to Birol, modern AI agents work by aggregating all of that context into a single reasoning layer.
Instead of humans manually stitching together signals, the system continuously evaluates relationships between events. For example:
By combining these insights, the AI can determine whether the correct response is to:
To prevent risky actions, these systems operate within carefully defined guardrails and remediation policies, ensuring automation helps rather than harms production environments.
Birolās perspective on reliability engineering is shaped by his background as Chief Product Owner for Big Data products at REWE Digital before founding ilert.
That experience gave him a product-centric lens on operations.
Instead of treating incidents purely as operational events, he sees them as product experience problems.
From that viewpoint, reliability engineering becomes less about firefighting and more about designing systems that:
As autonomous agents take on more of the routine incident work, the role of the human SRE will likely evolve.
Rather than spending most of their time responding to alerts, engineers will increasingly focus on:
In other words, the SRE of the future may look less like a firefighter and more like a systems architect overseeing intelligent automation.
For many engineers, being on-call remains one of the most stressful parts of the job.
Birol believes that autonomous incident resolution can fundamentally change that experience.
If AI agents can reliably detect, diagnose, and remediate common failure scenarios, teams can dramatically reduce the number of alerts that require human intervention.
The long-term goal isnāt to remove humans from operations entirely. Instead, itās to eliminate the repetitive operational toil that prevents engineers from focusing on higher-value work.
When systems resolve routine incidents automatically, teams gain the freedom to spend more time on:
Birol Yildizās vision for the future of SRE reflects a broader shift happening across the industry.
Observability, automation, and AI are converging to create systems that can understand infrastructure and respond intelligently to failures.
If that vision succeeds, the next generation of reliability engineering might look very different from today.
Fewer dashboards.
Fewer manual investigations.
And far fewer 3 a.m. incident pages.
Enjoy conversations like this with engineers, founders, and reliability leaders from across the cloud-native ecosystem.
Follow ShipTalk on your favorite podcast platform and stay tuned for more stories from the people building the systems that power modern technology. šļøš
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Harness AI is starting 2026 by doubling down on what it does best: applying intelligent automation to the hardest āafter codeā problems, incidents, security, and test setup, with three new AI-powered capabilities. These updates continue the same theme as December: move faster, keep control, and let AI handle more of the tedious, error-prone work in your delivery and security pipelines.
Harness AI SRE now includes the Human-Aware Change Agent, an AI system that treats human insight as first-class operational data and connects it to the changes that actually break production. Instead of relying only on logs and metrics, it listens to real incident conversations in tools like Slack, Teams, and Zoom and turns those clues into structured signals.ā
By unifying human observations with the software delivery knowledge graph and change intelligence, teams get a much faster path from āwhat are we seeing?ā to āwhat changed?ā to āwhat should we roll back or fix safely?ā The result is shorter incidents, clearer ownership, and a teammate-like AI that reasons about both people and systems in real time.ā Learn more in the announcement blog post.
Effective application security starts with knowing what you actually have in production. Traditional API naming based on regex heuristics often leads to over-merged or under-merged API groups, noisy inventories, and false positives across detection workflows.ā
This month, API naming in our Traceable product gets a major upgrade with AI-powered API semantics:
For security leaders trying to tame API sprawl, this is a foundational improvement that boosts signal quality across the entire platform.ā
Authentication setup has been one of the most consistent sources of friction for application security testing. Manual scripting, validation cycles, and back-and-forths often create bottlenecks ā and a broken auth script can quietly invalidate an entire scan run.ā
To solve this, all API Security Testing customers now get AI-based Authentication Script Generation:
The result is less time lost to brittle auth setup, faster onboarding for new apps, and fewer failed scans due to script errors.ā
You can find implementation details and examples in the docs.

Security and platform teams often know the question they want to ask: āWhere is this component used?ā āWhich exemptions are still pending?ā , but answering it requires hopping across dashboards and stitching together filters by hand.ā
The new AppSec Agent makes this dramatically easier by letting you query AppSec data using natural language.

This is a big step toward making AppSec data as queryable and collaborative as the rest of your engineering stack. Learn more in the docs.ā
Harness AI is focused on everything after code is written ā building, testing, deploying, securing, and optimizing software through intelligent automation and agentic workflows. Januaryās updates extend that vision across:
Teams adopting these features can ship changes faster, investigate less, and focus more of their time on the work that actually moves the business ā while Harness AI quietly handles the complexity in the background.
Checkout Event: Harness at RSAC


At Harness, our story has always been about change ā helping teams ship faster, deploy safer, and control the blast radius of every modification to production. Deployments, feature flags, pipelines, and governance are all expressions of how organizations evolve their software.
Today, the pace of change is accelerating. As AI-assisted development becomes the norm, more code reaches production faster, often without a clear link to the engineer who wrote it. Now, Day 2 isnāt just supporting the unknown ā itās supporting software shaped by changes that may not have a clear human owner.
And as every SRE and on-call engineer knows, even rigorous change hygiene doesnāt prevent incidents because real-world systems donāt fail neatly. They fail under load, at the edges, in the unpredictable ways software meets traffic patterns, caches, databases, user behavior, and everything in between.
When that happens, teams fall back on what theyāve always relied on: Human conversation and deep understanding of what changed.
Thatās why today weāre excited to introduce the Harness Human-Aware Change Agent ā the first AI system designed to treat human insight as operational data and use it to drive automated, change-centric investigation during incidents.
Not transcription plus RCA. One unified intelligence engine grounded in how incidents actually unfold.
The Human-Aware Change Agent is part of Harness AI SRE ā a unified incident response system built to help teams resolve incidents faster without scaling headcount. AI SRE brings together the critical parts of response: capturing context, coordinating action, and operationalizing investigation.
At the center is the AI Scribe, because the earliest and most important clues in an incident often surface in conversation before they appear in dashboards. Scribe listens across an organizationās tools with awareness of the incident itself ā filtering out unrelated chatter and capturing only the decisions, actions, and timestamps that matter. The challenge isnāt producing a transcript; itās isolating the human signals responders actually use.
Those signals feed directly into the Human-Aware Change Agent, which drives change-centric investigation during incidents.
And once that context exists, AI SRE helps teams act on it: Automation Runbooks standardize first response and remediation, while On-Call and Escalations ensure incidents reach the right owner immediately.
AI SRE also fits into the tools teams already run ā with native integrations and flexible webhooks that connect observability, alerting, ticketing, and chat across systems like Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, and Teams.
Most AI approaches to SRE assume incidents can be solved entirely through machine signals ā logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, anomaly detectors. But if youāve ever been on an incident bridge, you know thatās not how reality works.
Some of the most important clues come from humans:
These early observations shape the investigation long before anyone pulls up a dashboard.
Yet most AI tools never hear any of that.
The Harness Human-Aware Change Agent changes this. It listens to the same conversations your engineers are having ā in Slack, Teams, Zoom bridges ā and transforms the human story of the incident into actionable intelligence that guides automated change investigation.
It is the first AI system that understands both what your team is saying and what your systems have changed ā and connects them in real time.
1. It listens and understands human context.
Using AI Scribe as its conversational interface, the agent captures operational signals from a teamās natural dialogue ā impacted services, dependencies, customer-reported symptoms, emerging theories or contradictions, and key sequence-of-events clues (āright beforeā¦ā).
The value is in recognizing human-discovered clues, and converting them into signals that guide next steps.
2. It investigates changes based on those clues.
The agent then uses these human signals to direct investigation across your full change graph including deployments, feature flags or config changes, infrastructure updates, and ITSM change records ā triangulating what engineers are seeing with what is actually changing in your production environment.
3. It surfaces evidence-backed hypotheses.
Instead of throwing guesses at the team, it produces clear, explainable insights:
āA deployment to checkout-service completed 12 minutes before the incident began. That deploy introduced a new retry configuration for the payment adapter. Immediately afterward, request latency started climbing and downstream timeouts increased.ā
Each hypothesis comes with supporting data and reasoning, allowing teams to quickly validate or discard theories.
4. It helps teams act faster and safer
By uniting human observations with machine-driven change intelligence, the agent dramatically shortens the path from:
What are we seeing? ā What changed? ā What should we do?
Teams quickly gain clarity on where to focus, whatās most suspicious, and which rollback or mitigation actions exist and are safest.
With this release, Harness is redefining what AI for incident management looks like.
Not a detached assistant. Not a dashboard summarizer. But a teammate that understands what responders are saying, investigates what systems have changed, connects the dots, and helps teams get to truth faster.
Because the future of incident response isnāt AI working alone. Itās AI working alongside engineers ā understanding humans and systems in equal measure.
Book a demo of Harness AI SRE to see how human insight and change intelligence come together during real incidents.
ā


Dec 1 to 5 Ā· Booth 731 Ā· The Venetian Ā· Las Vegas
(Harness is an AWS Partner)
AI dominates re:Invent 2025, and engineering leaders everywhere are asking the same question:
Which AI will actually help teams ship better software on AWS with less friction?
This year Harness invites you to step into a Squid Game inspired AI Survival Arena. Pick your role, take on challenges, earn rewards, and leave Las Vegas with real AI powered delivery strategies. Captain Canary will be on site in a special 456 uniform to welcome players into the game.

Add Booth 731 to your conference planner and find all event details here.
Select the role that defines your strategy inside the arena:
Your journey begins at Booth 731.
In The State of AI in Software Engineering, teams report using 8 to 10 different AI tools across dev, test, security, and ops. Tool overload slows delivery, increases friction, and creates unnecessary complexity.
Your objective: Discover how one unified, AI powered delivery platform on AWS can simplify CI, CD, cost, and security at once.
Download The State of AI in Software Engineering before re:Invent.
Inside the arena, you can unlock:
This is where the competition begins.
Get ready for epic AI GAME swag, surprise giveaways, and booth-exclusive merch. Weāre talking a mix of playful items, premium collectibles, and fan favorites designed to make your re:Invent run a lot more fun. Swing by to see what you can win.
Complete as many as you can:
ā Ask where AI can remove a step in your delivery flow
ā Pick your role and request a Day 1 Experiment to try at home
ā Bring your cloud bill and learn where AI optimization can have immediate impact
ā Share your top engineering metric and see how AI can improve it
Bonus: Share your most challenging pipeline story and ask how AI can help resolve it.
Dec 2 Ā· 8:45 PM to 11:45 PM Ā· Flight Club, The Venetian
Darts, drinks, and DevOps. This is where teams talk honestly about AI, velocity, AWS, risk, and reality.
Register for the After Hours event.
For directors, VPs, and execs looking for high signal conversations.
Dec 2 Ā· 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM Ā· Mastroās Ocean Prime
Dec 3 Ā· 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM Ā· STK Steakhouse [Invite only].
Enjoy a curated culinary experience and meaningful conversation with Harness executives and industry leaders in an evening designed to connect, celebrate, and look ahead.
This dinner is at capacity. To join the waitlist, email jessica.jackson@harness.io
Dec 3 Ā· 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM Ā· Sadelleās Cafe
Connect with technology and security leaders to explore modern AppSec challenges and how top organizations are securing apps and APIs without slowing innovation. Gain actionable insights through open conversation in an intimate, curated executive setting.
Register for the AppSec Luncheon.
Thursday, December 4 | 1:00 PM | Room: MGM Grand 116
Join leaders from Marriott International and Harness for a deep dive into how Marriott modernized their global delivery ecosystem, built a resilient cloud-native foundation, and prepared their engineering org for an AI-enabled future.
Speakers include:
Add this session to your agenda [DVT104-S].
Harness is an AWS Partner with a delivery platform purpose-built for AWS environments. Many teams also choose to run Harness through AWS Marketplace for a native buying experience.
Before re:Invent
During re:Invent
After re:Invent
Come ready to play, learn, build, and win. Step into the arena with confidence because Harness will bring the AWS expertise, the AI innovation, and the platform your team needs to advance.
The games begin at Booth 731. Are you ready to make it to the final round?
ā
Checkout the Event: After Hours with Harness at AWS re:Invent!, re:Invent re:Cap w/ Harness Raffle


Most incidents begin with change, yet traditional incident response tools treat them as isolated events. What if your response was seamlessly connected to the systems, changes, and workflows that caused themāleveraging generative AI to connect the dots? Not as a replacement for your team, but as a teammate working alongside them to help prevent, triage, and resolve issues faster.
Weāre thrilled to announce that Harness Incident Response (IR) is coming! This next-generation solution combines proactive issue prevention and rapid incident resolution to empower modern teams to minimize downtime, streamline workflows, and achieve operational excellence.
Harness IR builds on the foundation of Harnessās AI agent architecture, extending its capabilities beyond software delivery into the realm of incident response. At the heart of Harness IR is an always-available AI SRE agent seamlessly integrated within the Harness DevOps ecosystem. The AI SRE agent delivers actionable insights, guided triage, and tailored recommendations by connecting data across CI/CD pipelines, Feature Flags, infrastructure changes, and external updates. It doesnāt just correlate changesāit works dynamically with your team, asking questions to fill in gaps and ensuring critical context is never missing. Think of it as a dynamic runbook reimagined, where AI doesnāt act alone but collaborates with humans to drive faster, smarter decisions.
Harness IR is built on a foundation of end-to-end visibility and automation, enabling teams to track every change across the software delivery lifecycle, from code commits to deployments, and overlay that with alerts and incidents for a holistic view. It provides a single pane of glass for operational visibility, centralizing all critical data so your team can anticipate and mitigate issues before they escalate.
Harness the power of AI to detect application failures, identify root causes, and suggest actionable remediation steps. The AI SRE agent ensures faster, smarter decisions while preventing future issues by delivering actionable insights and guiding teams through triage and resolution.

Coordinate workflows, automate responses, and streamline incident resolution with an end-to-end operational control plane spanning the entire software delivery lifecycleāincluding deployments, feature releases, security incidents, and cost anomalies. More than just orchestration, it acts as a centralized operations hub, offering a single pane of glass to monitor your pipeline and controls to take action in real-time.
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Harness IR combines on-call management, runbooks, incident workflows, readiness drills, and SLO tracking into a single, unified platform. Fully integrated into your DevOps workflows, it ensures seamless coordination across teams, clear accountability, and actionable insights. By aligning operations with software delivery, it enhances readiness, improves MTTR, and drives continuous improvement in reliability and efficiency.

Plan, prepare, and respond to incidents with confidence. Simulate real-world scenarios through fire drills to test processes, train teams, and evaluate performance. Gain organization-wide readiness ratings, identifying strengths and areas for improvement to ensure your team is always prepared to respond effectively, minimize downtime, and enhance collaboration during critical incidents.
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Equip developers with integrated tools, actionable insights, and runbooks designed to debug and resolve application issues in production environments.
With native integrations for tools like Slack, MS Teams, and ServiceNow, Harness IR bridges the gap between automation, collaboration, and AI, empowering your team to focus on what matters mostādelivering value to your customers.
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Join the waitlist today and help shape the future of AI-powered incident response with Harness! Check out our website for more information on our key features and capabilities.
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