AI Clarity Scoring Boosts Incident Message Readability

During a major IT incident, clear and concise communication is not just a nice-to-have; it's a critical component of the response. Miscommunication, ambiguity, or technical jargon can lead to confusion, delay resolution, and amplify stress for everyone involved, from the on-call engineer to the executive team. The financial stakes are incredibly high. The cost of IT downtime is a significant business risk, with over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises reporting average hourly downtime costs exceeding $300,000 [3]. Even for smaller companies, the impact is substantial, with estimates showing a potential loss of over $3,300 per hour [5]. To address this challenge, Rootly's AI Clarity Scoring provides a systematic way to ensure all incident messages are quantifiable, effective, and easy to understand.

The Challenge of Communicating During a Crisis

Incident communication is often plagued by common pitfalls that are amplified in high-pressure environments. Panicked updates, dense technical jargon, and incomplete information can create more questions than answers, hindering the response effort. A core challenge is crafting messages that serve two different audiences simultaneously: the technical responders who need specific details and the non-technical stakeholders who require high-level status updates.

Effective incident response requires a strategic approach that prioritizes both speed and clarity [7]. Without a system in place, teams often struggle with common communication failures like unclear messaging, slow updates, and internal misalignment, which erodes trust and complicates resolution [6].

Introducing AI-Enhanced Clarity Scoring for Incident Messages

Rootly's AI Clarity Scoring is a feature designed to solve this communication dilemma. It functions as a real-time analytical tool, providing objective feedback on the readability and effectiveness of incident communications. The hypothesis is simple: improving the clarity of a message will improve the efficiency of the response. This feature tests that hypothesis by analyzing updates as they are written.

The goal is to empower users to write clearer messages that anyone—from an engineer to a CEO—can understand. This is particularly vital for auto-notifying executives during major incidents, as the information they receive must be concise, accurate, and free of confusing technical language. The AI provides the data-driven feedback needed to craft these perfect executive summaries under pressure.

How It Works: Real-Time Feedback and Suggestions

The mechanism is straightforward and designed for immediate impact. As a team member types an update within the Rootly platform—whether for a Slack channel, an email summary, or a status page—the AI analyzes the text in real-time.

• An instant clarity score is generated, offering a quantifiable measure of the message's readability.
• The AI provides actionable suggestions to improve the score. This can include recommendations to simplify complex sentences, define acronyms, or replace jargon with more accessible terms.

This process transforms the subjective art of writing into a more scientific, repeatable process, ensuring a consistent standard of communication across all incidents.

Key Benefits of Improving Message Readability

Implementing a system for empirically measuring and improving message clarity yields several quantifiable benefits for the entire incident management lifecycle.

Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

There is a direct correlation between communication clarity and incident resolution speed. When updates are unambiguous, teams can coordinate more effectively, eliminate confusion, and diagnose problems faster. By providing tools that enhance communication, Rootly helps organizations systematically improve key metrics across the entire incident lifecycle. You can learn more about how Rootly helps manage incidents.

Keep All Stakeholders Informed and Aligned

Clear, jargon-free updates reduce the anxiety and speculation that often comes from leadership, customer support, and other non-technical teams. When executives and other stakeholders receive communications they can immediately understand, they are less likely to interrupt responders with requests for clarification. This allows the technical teams to focus on the problem at hand. Furthermore, these simplified messages are perfect for public-facing communications. You can publish them directly to your Incident Status Pages to keep customers and partners informed and build trust during an outage.

Enhance Post-Incident Learning

The benefits of clear communication extend beyond the active incident. A clear, easy-to-read incident timeline is an invaluable asset during the post-incident review process. When events, actions, and decisions are documented with clarity, teams can more accurately identify root causes and generate meaningful action items. This creates a stronger feedback loop for continuous improvement.

How to Get Started with AI Clarity Scoring in Rootly

Adopting AI Clarity Scoring is a simple process. It's designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows.

1. Enable the Feature: Administrators can navigate to the Rootly AI section within the platform settings and opt in to enable Clarity Scoring for their organization.
2. Start Writing: Once enabled, the feature works automatically across Rootly's communication channels. Team members will see real-time scores and suggestions as they type incident updates. For more on configuration, see how other AI features like the Incident Catchup are set up.
3. Configure Notifications: Ensure these clear messages reach the right people by properly configuring your notification channels. Rootly allows you to set up and customize email, Slack, SMS, and other notification types to streamline communication. Check out our getting started guide on notifications to learn more.

Conclusion: Making Every Word Count During an Incident

Incident communication is a difficult but essential discipline. The cost of IT downtime is not just a technical problem but a critical business concern that impacts revenue and productivity [2]. Rootly's AI-enhanced clarity scoring for incident messages provides a powerful, data-driven tool that empowers teams to communicate more effectively, even under extreme pressure.

By leveraging AI to provide quantifiable feedback on message readability, Rootly helps organizations systematically reduce confusion, accelerate incident resolution, and build trust with all stakeholders.

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