OOPS #16 - Humans in the Loop: The Future of Incident Response

A 'Humans in the Loop' community event with Uptime Labs, PagerDuty & Elastic!
We’re taking over the Greenwich Design District for an evening dedicated to the unsung heroes of the stack: The Humans in the Loop. AI adoption offers a range of benefits, but while our systems get more complex, the role of the human in incident response has never been more critical.
Come trade your real-time operations stories, share your best 'oops' moments, and learn how to keep the 'human' in your high-availability architecture.
What to expect:
🎤 Lightning Keynotes - short, sharp and stimulating, local experts share their takes.
🍻 Sip & Savour: Delicious pizza and refreshing drinks to fuel the conversation.
🤝 The OOPs Group: Connect with the outage ops + incident response community, because misery loves company, but resilience loves a party.
RSVP now before we reach capacity! (We’d hate to have to rate-limit you)

Talks:

Many Humans in Many Loops
Human in the Loop, or HITL, provides us the ability to validate AI output using friendly and knowledgeable humans. But is that the only human loop in AI incident management systems? Join Carly as she covers other human loops, including reinforcement learning with feedback and context engineering, and how loops with a low threshold encourage alert fatigue.

Speaker: Carly Richmond, Developer Advocate Lead (Elastic)

Incident Response Reimagined: Accelerating Resolution with AI Agents
Learn how PagerDuty is leveraging Agentic AI to transform the incident lifecycle from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention.

Daniel demonstrates how new tools like the SRE Agent and Scribe Agent assist engineers during high-pressure outages by autonomously triaging alerts, querying logs in tools like Grafana, and transcribing context directly into incident channels.

Beyond immediate response, this demo highlights a "shift left" strategy using the new PagerDuty MCP server and Claude Code plugin, which allows developers to assess the risk of code changes against historical incident data before deployment, ultimately aiming to reduce the frequency of on-call.
Speaker: Daniel Afonso Senior Developer Advocate (PagerDuty)
The Left-Over Principle: Incident Response in the Age of AI
Aka why automating incident response creates the very expertise gap it tries to close — and what we can do about it.
As increased automation drives a need for greater human expertise to deal with leftover tasks, it simultaneously reduces the opportunity to develop it.
Joe's talk aims to equip incident commanders with a mental model for navigating AI adoption in IR - and leave them with something practical to take back to their team.
Speaker: Joe McKevitt, CTO at Uptime Labs

About Your Hosts:
Uptime Labs is a UK-based company that provides a realistic incident response simulation platform designed to help engineering and SRE teams build resilience and confidence. Their platform allows organisations to rehearse high-stakes outage scenarios in a safe, risk-free environment, effectively helping teams develop the 'muscle memory' needed to handle real crises. By practising with lifelike drills that mirror production failures, Uptime Labs aims to reduce Time to Mitigation (TTM) and ensure that responders are better prepared, less stressed, and more consistent in their decision-making during actual incidents. Learn more at https://uptimelabs.io/

PagerDuty is an incident management and real-time operations platform powered by AI designed to help teams detect, respond to, and resolve critical issues faster. For developers, PagerDuty streamlines on-call management, automates alerting, and integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Slack, GitHub, and AWS. Whether you’re building, deploying, or maintaining services, PagerDuty empowers engineering teams to minimize downtime, collaborate efficiently, and deliver reliable digital experiences. Learn more at https://www.pagerduty.com/

Elastic, the Search AI Company, integrates its expertise in search technology with artificial intelligence to help everyone transform data into answers, actions, and outcomes. Elastic's Search AI Platform — the foundation for its search, observability, and security solutions — is used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500. Learn more at: https://www.elastic.co/