Speaker Spotlight: Paul Stack – From Runbooks to Models: AI-Native Operations
Paul Stack makes the case that when dev velocity goes 10x, operations needs a fundamental rethink – typed models, composable primitives, and automation designed for agents.
We’re excited to announce Paul Stack as a speaker at Agentic Conf Hamburg on March 22nd!
About Paul
Paul Stack is Director of Product at System Initiative and a well-known voice in the infrastructure and DevOps community. He’s spoken at events around the world about his passion for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and solid operational practices – and why they should be part of what developers and system administrators do every day.
Paul believes that reliably delivering software is more important than its development. His focus areas are the DevOps and Continuous Delivery movements, and how they help the entire business and its customers.
You can follow Paul on X (@stack72).
The Talk: From Runbooks to Models: AI-Native Operations
When development velocity increases 10x through AI-assisted coding, operations becomes the bottleneck – not because teams are doing it wrong, but because the tools weren’t designed for this pace.
Paul argues that traditional Infrastructure as Code won’t work with AI agents. It’s dominated by taste and principles, with no architectural constraints for agents to follow. Teams that build software with AI have learned this the hard way: architecture leads to stability, vibes lead to chaos. The same pattern applies to operations.
What we need is automation designed for agents as the primary consumer: transparent type systems they can introspect, extensible primitives they can compose, schemas that match the domain, inline validation, and coverage across the full operational lifecycle – not just provisioning.
In this talk, you’ll see live demos of AI agents building workflows from intent, discovering production state through typed models, and composing operations through versioned data. Paul will also discuss what this means for the SRE role: the evolution from operator to architect, from reactive to proactive, from tribal knowledge to encoded knowledge.
See Paul Live
Catch this full talk and many more at Agentic Conf Hamburg on March 22, 2026 at SAE Institute Hamburg.