When PagerDuty CIO Eric Johnson assumed his role at the SaaS digital operations and incident management company two years ago, automation was top of mind.
“There was definitely a need for automation,” Johnson told IT Brew. “I don’t know if the company really knew that. I think they suspected that, but no one was really building a program around that.”
To do so, Johnson and his team built a “small but mighty” crew of staffers with expertise in automation tools to serve as “internal consultants” and determine areas of opportunity for automation at the company, which has more than 1,000 employees across the world. Johnson, who previously served as CIO at SurveyMonkey and Docusign, said he assembled the dedicated team of three employees for the initiative after seeing past automation projects remain stagnant due to a lack of ownership around them.
“Automation was one of those things that was talked about and it was [a] best effort from the existing teams,” Johnson said. “What…I continued to be frustrated by was the fact that we weren’t making real progress on it because it wasn’t someone’s core job.”
Automated up. Johnson said PagerDuty’s automation team works collaboratively with the company’s data team to execute automations throughout the organization.
“Data is a key component to making these AI things work properly and in partnership with the business,” he said.
The specialized team paid off for PagerDuty in a multitude of ways, Johnson said. Newly introduced agentic support by the automation team has helped the company’s IT department to quickly assist employees seeking out assistance from the help desk.
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“We have an agent solution that’s actually checking our knowledge base, checking the internet, checking whatever documentation we have to be able to go and respond to that person’s request and give them a response that’s highly accurate,” Johnson said. The company currently targets an over 30% deflection rate, which means 30% of help desk tickets that come in do not require human involvement.
Other departments have reaped the benefit of the team as well. Johnson said the automation team has helped PagerDuty’s finance team streamline some of the manual processes involved when closing a book, saving them thousands of hours per year on “manual toil.”
“There’s a lot less human involvement in the process to actually close the quarter, which by the way, the finance team loves because it takes a lot of valuable cycles for them to go through all of that reconciliation,” he said.
Johnson told IT Brew he sees PagerDuty’s automation team slowly beginning to “morph” into an AI team as technology moves automation toward agentic AI.
“We’re starting to open up the aperture and the charter of that automation team to say, ‘Hey, not only do you your traditional automation work, but now we want you to start taking on some agentic AI programs and start thinking about how we can use some of the new technologies to drive automation,’” Johnson said.