What happens to observability when the person staring at the dashboard can no longer understand the code an AI just wrote?

Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal and a Columbia professor with an MIT PhD, spent two and a half years building an agentic AI SRE platform for enterprises that generate roughly a petabyte of telemetry a day, and in this conversation he dismantles the twenty year old assumption that a human is watching the dashboard and exposes why that model collapses at industrial scale.

You will see why dashboards are really just enshrined queries built to explain the past instead of predicting novel failures, and why causal AI matters when one broken service spreads like an epidemic and every alert becomes a fake needle in a haystack

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Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:18 - Why Dashboards Are Breaking 3:47 - Building Traversal AI SRE 4:37 - Research Roots in Causal AI 7:29 - Why Startups Beat Academia Now 8:44 - What Happens to SREs 11:12 - The End of the War Room 13:16 - Are Dashboards Obsolete 14:47 - The Rise of the SR Researcher 17:35 - Why Incumbents Cannot Win 20:16 - Talent Density as the Moat 25:18 - Book Recommendation

Book Recommendation: Mostly Harmless Econometrics

About Anish Agarwal: Anish is the CEO and co-founder of Traversal, an agentic AI SRE platform that helps enterprises troubleshoot and self-heal complex systems at a scale where telemetry can reach a petabyte of data a day. A professor at Columbia University with a PhD from MIT, he built the company alongside co-founders whose research spans causal AI and reinforcement learning, translating that academic depth into a product that rethinks observability from the ground up for a world where AI writes the code. He is passionate about removing the most painful parts of the site reliability engineer's job so that engineers can get back to architecting resilient systems rather than firefighting incidents.

Follow Anish Agarwal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anish-agarwal-io/

About the show Inside the Silicon Mind takes you behind the scenes with the founders, CEOs, and VCs building the future of technology. Every week, Firas Sozan sits down with the operators and investors rewriting the rules - from deep‑tech startups to the security challenges created by AI.

Hosted by Firas Sozan. Powered by Harrison Clarke.

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