How Rootly AI Recommends Next Steps in Active Incidents

Managing a technical incident is a high-pressure situation. When a system fails, the response team is under immense stress to process a flood of information and make critical decisions quickly. In the middle of this chaos, figuring out the best next step can be challenging. Rootly AI acts as a co-pilot, helping your team navigate this complexity by providing intelligent, context-aware recommendations. It’s important to remember that AI serves to augment, not replace, the expertise of your engineers. These AI-powered tools are designed to streamline the entire incident response process, from the initial alert to the post-incident review [8].

The Intelligence Behind the Recommendation: How Rootly AI Works

Rootly AI isn't a single feature but a suite of generative AI capabilities integrated throughout the incident lifecycle. The AI doesn’t make suggestions in a vacuum; it analyzes the full context of an incident to understand what’s happening. You can explore a complete overview of Rootly's AI features to see how they work together.

The AI synthesizes several key data points to build a complete picture:

• The initial alert data that triggered the incident.
• Conversations happening in the dedicated Slack channel.
• Actions and events logged in the incident timeline.
• Decisions made and logged by the response team.
• Data from other integrated tools, like monitoring or project management platforms.

This comprehensive analysis allows the AI to provide relevant and timely suggestions. However, the quality of these recommendations is directly tied to the quality of the data it receives. Incomplete or inaccurate inputs can lead to less effective guidance. The goal is to create an AI that acts like a helpful senior engineer, providing proactive troubleshooting tips and accurate summaries, all while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy and security [7].

Asking for Guidance: Using "Ask Rootly AI" for Next Steps

"Ask Rootly AI" is the primary way your team can interact directly with the AI during an incident. Responders can ask for guidance right in the incident's Slack channel or through the Rootly web interface, making it easy to get help without switching contexts.

How to Prompt the AI for Next Steps

Users can ask direct, natural-language questions to get recommendations. This removes guesswork and helps the team move forward with confidence. For the best results, prompts should be as clear and specific as possible, as vague questions may yield more generic answers.

Here are a few example prompts responders can use:

• "What should I do next?"
• "What are the next steps for this incident?"
• "What have we tried so far?"
• "What questions should we be asking to solve this?"

These prompts are invaluable for guiding responders, especially for those just joining an incident or when the team feels stuck. By using the Ask Rootly AI feature, teams can quickly regain momentum.

Beyond Next Steps: Gaining Situational Awareness

Recommending a good "next step" often requires a solid understanding of what has already happened. Rootly AI excels at this by providing quick summaries and catch-ups for team members who are new to the incident or need a refresher. This AI-powered Incident Catchup feature helps everyone get on the same page, fast [3].

In addition to next steps, you can ask the AI other questions to build context, such as:

• "What happened?"
• "Who is the commander?"
• "Write me a summary of the incident so far."

How Supporting AI Features Improve Recommendations

The accuracy of "next step" recommendations is constantly improving thanks to other AI features that gather and process information throughout the incident.

The AI Meeting Bot and Data Capture

Important details and decisions often happen during verbal conversations in incident "war rooms" (meetings on platforms like Zoom or Google Meet). It can be challenging to capture this information accurately. Rootly's AI Meeting Bot solves this by joining these calls to transcribe and summarize the discussions. By partnering with Recall.ai, Rootly was able to quickly integrate this function, turning spoken words into a searchable, analyzable part of the incident record [5]. This captured data feeds into the AI's overall understanding, though it's worth noting that its analysis depends on the accuracy of the transcription, which can sometimes miss complex technical nuance.

Automated Summarization and Title Generation

As an incident evolves, so does the team's understanding of it. The Rootly AI Editor automatically generates and updates incident titles and summaries as new information becomes available [2] [1]. This automation ensures that the core context is always current. When the AI has the latest information, it can provide more accurate and relevant next-step suggestions based on the most recent understanding of the problem.

Streamlining Your Workflow with AI Recommendations

The practical benefits of using Rootly AI for next-step recommendations are significant. These features reduce the cognitive burden—or mental effort—on the incident commander and the entire team. Instead of trying to remember every detail, they can rely on the AI to keep track of the context.

The AI acts as a guide, helping prevent teams from getting tunnel vision on a single solution and ensuring they follow established best practices or internal playbooks. Best of all, this happens seamlessly within Slack, the platform where your teams are already collaborating to solve the problem [4].

Conclusion: Making Smarter Decisions, Faster

Rootly AI recommends next steps by analyzing the complete incident context, drawing from Slack messages, timelines, meeting transcriptions, and more. By using simple, conversational prompts with features like Ask Rootly AI, teams can get immediate, actionable guidance without breaking their workflow. This capability transforms Rootly AI from a simple documentation tool into an intelligent partner. It empowers your team to make smarter decisions, resolve incidents faster, and ultimately build more resilient systems. Explore the full suite of Rootly AI tools to learn more.

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