Courtney Nash, The VOID, and Robbie Ostrow, OpenAI
From writing scripts to analyzing incidents, AI promises to change how SREs work. But how much of that is practical, and how much is vaporware? In this interactive discussion, engage with other conference participants to talk through what is actually working (real tools and use cases), what is failing (where it creates complexity and noise), and the messy reality of interacting with non-deterministic systems while supporting production environments.
Courtney Nash is the Co-founder and CEO of The VOID. Her research focuses on system safety and failures in complex sociotechnical systems. An erstwhile cognitive neuroscientist, she has always been fascinated by how people learn, and the ways memory influences how they solve problems. Over the past two decades, she has held a variety of editorial, program management, research, and management roles at Verica, Holloway, Fastly, O’Reilly Media, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Robbie Ostrow works on infrastructure and reliability at OpenAI, where he spends far too much time trying to formally express the invariants he expects from his systems. Before OpenAI, Robbie led engineering teams at Q Bio and Vanta, where he preached the same ideas at much smaller scales. When he isn’t thinking about type systems or breaking changes, you can find him in San Francisco playing word games or hunting down merch from failed companies.
author = {Courtney Nash and Robbie Ostrow},
title = {{AI} in {SRE}},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}