AI is either the end of knowledge work or a giant bubble- depending on who you ask (and what they are selling).
Meanwhile, the real failure modes keep piling up: slop, embarrassing production incidents, irresponsible reorgs and layoffs, and top-down mandates driving engineers toward ‘tokenmaxxing’. One widely-cited MIT study found 95% of enterprise AI deployments fail to deliver measurable value- and points to organizational failure, not the tech, as the reason.
Like VMs, cloud, and containers before it, AI is here to stay. The question for SREs is the same one we always ask: how do we use it to actually solve problems?
On this episode of Reliability Rebels, I talk with Stephen Roylance- 30 years across health care, e-commerce, and big tech, including time we spent together in Meta Production Engineering. He now runs a small applied AI consultancy with his wife Susan from a solar-powered home in Western Massachusetts.
No hype- just a conversation between two systems people on how to deploy this technology without repeating the mistakes everyone else is making.
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