AI and Observability: The Hype, The Reality, The Opportunity

Join us for an evening of candid discussion, community insights, and future-forward thinking. Food, drinks and prizes included at no cost.

Agenda:

5:30pm: Arrive, drinks, food
6:00pm: Main Speaker (Siti Chen, Regional Mgr Enterprise Sales Engineering @ Datadog)
6:30pm: Panel: Brian Stinehart (Staff Solution Engineer @ Grafana Labs), Liz Fong-Jones (Field CTO @ Honeycomb IO), Lily Martin (AI engineer @ NAB)
7:00pm: Networking and Drinks
7:30pm: Event end, optional to join nearby at a local venue

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the tech landscape, observability is emerging as a critical enabler for making sense of increasingly complex systems. But what’s real and what’s just hype? Where are teams actually seeing results today – and where is the biggest potential yet to be unlocked?

In this interactive session, we'll unpack:

• The Hype: Exploring the promises and pitfalls of AI in observability tooling – what vendors are saying vs. what's landing in real-world environments.
• The Reality: Case studies and firsthand experiences from engineers and SREs implementing AI/ML in production monitoring, incident management, and root cause analysis.
• The Opportunity: Where we go next – how AI can elevate engineering workflows, drive cultural change, and create new strategic value.

Whether you're sceptical, curious, or already experimenting, this session will offer practical takeaways and a chance to connect with like-minded peers navigating the same space.

This is a vendor-agnostic event.

Who should attend: Technology leaders, DevOps engineers, SREs, platform teams, data scientists, and engineering experts looking to understand the intersection of AI and observability in modern systems.

Format: Panel discussion · Open Q&A · Networking drinks