We all remember the days of "AIOps", right? An overused term that made promises it couldn't keep about developer and SRE tooling. And while for years the magic never came, today the breakthroughs in AI have taken the world by storm.

That's not to say there aren't legitimate concerns about the rise of AI. For one, how reliable is it? Hallucinations still happen frequently, for example, and when dealing with enterprise software, reliability and security are of the utmost importance. And while some developers may be worried smart bots will eventually take their jobs, smart developers are leveraging artificial intelligence to make their jobs easier.

The right approach is "keeping humans in the loop" and making sure the gravity center of control remains among people. With the right tooling and controls in place, AI will act as an accelerator to businesses around the world, much of which today is driven by software.

In this article, we take a look at 4 AI-driven startups to watch in DevOps:

Rootly

The incident management space has exploded over the last few years. We've seen a few stand-outs that are helping enterprises have greater visibility into their incidents, mitigate them more quickly by getting more of the organization involved, and ultimately become more resilient companies that learn from their failures instead of sweeping them under the rug.

A star standout is Rootly that's raised over $15Million in funding from investors like Google, Renegade, and Y Combinator. Particularly interesting is their latest on-call solution, which many argue is the most critical piece to incident management. If the right person doesn't reliably get paged when something goes wrong, then the rest of the process - from collaboration through mitigation and learning - simply can't happen.

Rootly is uniquely positioned to help the enterprise streamline their incident management processes, and the recent addition of an AI-driven on-call solution to their platform makes them one of the top startups to watch in DevOps.

​​Rootly On-Call is the only multi-cloud alerting system in the market. This means that even if an entire AWS region goes down, you will always get your alerts as expected. It's critical that a company's on-call system is reliable and multi-cloud will hopefully be the new industry standard going forward.

The ethos behind Rootly's approach to AI is to keep the human at the center. Humans need to be free to do the creative work of solving complex problems about their unique systems, while leaving the AI to deal with the toil of writing up summaries and managing schedules. And because Rootly has more data and context than a legacy paging system, it can automatically build context-aware dashboards that prove extremely useful for individuals and teams triaging an incident.

Kentik

Kentik is a Network Observability platform that recently launched Kentik AI to democratize the ability to ask complex network questions and get fast answers. For example, Kentik Query Assistant promises that users can ask a question in natural language, while the Kentik platform performs all of the complex analysis behind the scenes to provide real-time answers for rapid network troubleshooting. The company also announced AI-assisted workflows under the name "Journeys AI" and we imagine this is just the beginning for this ambitious company.

Network Observability is an evolution of network performance monitoring that provides enterprises with more intelligent capabilities for complex networks. The addition of AI helps network teams optimize network health with real-time monitoring and alerting. Kentik unifies traffic flow with real-time and streaming device metrics in one SaaS platform, which lets network engineers correlate heterogeneous telemetry data from distributed infrastructure components.

GitLab

Gitlab is likely the most well-known company on this list, with a $10 Billion IPO in 2021. Since going public, the company has leaned hard into AI with GitLab Duo for shipping secure software throughout the entire software development lifecycle.Their chat functionality offers real-time guidance for technical and non-technical users across the entire software development lifecycle, providing the ability to chat with AI right in the IDE, and receive explanations about code in natural language.

Many developers are also leveraging code suggestions to write secure code more efficiently and accelerate cycle times by taking care of repetitive, routine coding tasks. While there are other solutions out there that offer code completion to significantly accelerate developer productivity, this is just one of many core features baked into GitLab Duo.

CAST AI

CAST AI is a cloud optimization platform that claims to cut cloud bills in half for AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure customers who use Kubernetes. Powered by AI, it analyzes multiple data points to find an optimal cost-performance ratio. While other "FinOps" solutions will charge customers a percentage of these savings, CAST AI is unique in letting customers keep those savings, and instead chooses a straightforward pricing model that doesn't increase over time.

They even have a totally free version that you can connect to your Kubernetes cluster and immediately receive cost-saving insights without needing to even enter a credit card. While Kubernetes is a popular technology, becoming the most popular project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), its complexity is something that many companies still wrestle with. Bringing AI to the table to help optimize performance and costs is a no-brainer for DevOps teams in 2024.

There are dozens of other startups we considered for this list. Similar to how a decade ago every modern company was becoming a software company, in some way or another, today every modern business will have to integrate AI to keep up. The ones who do it best will have transparency and keep the human in the loop. For DevOps teams, this hopefully means more reliable, secure, and collaborative software as we go full-steam ahead into the age of AI.