Show notes
What must happen before a business can trust AI agents to detect and resolve operational problems without waiting for human intervention? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Josh Clay, Regional Vice President of Solution Engineering for Dynatrace in the UK, about autonomous operations, AI observability, fragmented telemetry, business outcomes, and the growing pressure to control token and data costs. Josh has spent much of his 11 years at Dynatrace discussing the road toward autonomous operations. The earliest version involved reducing the time organizations spent inside IT war rooms. He remembers calls with 30 or 40 people attempting to establish which team was responsible for an incident. He jokingly calls this the "mean time to innocence." Modern observability reduced many of those investigations from several hours to between 30 and 60 minutes. Agentic AI creates the possibility of going further by identifying a problem, understanding its cause, and resolving it before the customer experience is affected. That ambition also introduces risk. Josh cites Dynatrace research showing that 52% of respondents view security, privacy, and compliance concerns as barriers to AI adoption. He believes many organizations still lack full observability across their existing technology environments, making autonomous agents harder to supervise. Josh shares a warning from Alex Hibbert of Storia Group: AI can amplify existing technology problems. If telemetry is fragmented, data quality is poor, or teams cannot see how services depend on one another, adding autonomous agents may increase the speed and scale of the resulting failure. Trust therefore depends on visibility. Josh describes observability as a control plane for agentic AI because it can show what an agent is doing, why it made a decision, and what happened afterward. Defined guardrails and real time information can give leaders confidence without asking them to surrender control blindly. The adoption figures show how early this work remains. Josh says 50% of businesses have AI operating in limited production use cases, often performing one isolated task. Only 23% describe their deployments as connected across the wider organization. We discuss how observability has progressed beyond technical monitoring. An airport can measure whether technology changes improve e-gate availability and passenger processing times. A bank can examine whether application performance affects mortgage completion rates. These connections allow leaders to measure AI through business results rather than relying entirely on response times and infrastructure metrics. Reliable agents also need suitable data. Dynatrace says AI agents operating with deterministic data can work 12 times more accurately and three times faster while using two and a half times fewer tokens. These remain company findings, but they demonstrate why context and causality can affect cost as well as reliability. Fragmented telemetry creates another barrier. Logs may sit in one platform, front end monitoring in another, and metrics or traces somewhere else. Attempting to reconstruct every relationship for an AI agent can become expensive and difficult. Josh recommends bringing observability data into a connected environment where relationships between services, cloud resources, traces, metrics, and logs are already understood. He also warns against collecting information simply because it exists. Data hoarding increases ingestion costs and can introduce personal information into systems without a clear business need. The conversation then moves toward AI FinOps. Leaders want to know what agents cost, how many tokens they consume, and whether those costs produce a measurable return. Josh describes a Dynatrace proof of concept that identified potential annual savings just below £250,000 within one small environment. That example reinforces a recurring concern. Organizations are racing to place AI into production, then moving to the next project without reviewing whether the previous environment is appropriately sized or financially efficient. Josh hopes companies will develop a more pragmatic view of AI as another enterprise tool. That means establishing agreed methods for deployment, monitoring, cost management, incident response, and measuring business results. Could observability provide the confidence businesses need to move from isolated AI experiments toward autonomous operations? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me.