I Put an AI Agent in My Incident Workflow for 7 Days. Here’s What Actually Broke.

Everyone says AI agents will reduce on-call fatigue. So I tried adding one into a real production incident workflow not to replace engineers, but to assist with triage, summarization, and next-step recommendations. It helped in some places. It failed in others. And the biggest lesson had less to do with the model and more to do with system design. The Setup I integrated an AI agent into a typical incident response flow: Incoming alerts from monitoring systems Initial triage and classification Root cause hypothesis Suggested remediation steps The agent was allowed to: Summarize alerts Group duplicate incidents Suggest possible causes Draft remediation steps The agent was NOT allowed to: Execute production changes Restart services Modify configs Trigger escalations automatically This was intentional. I wanted to see where it adds value without risking production. What Worked Surprisingly Well 1. Alert Summarization The agent reduced noisy alerts into clean summaries. Instead of reading t