Brian DeVore Consulting
AI Enablement & Automation

Your engineers are doing work that shouldn't require engineers.

Manual provisioning, repetitive runbook execution, alert triage, report generation — every hour spent on ops toil is an hour not spent on your product. We identify what to automate and build it.

The automation debt hiding in plain sight

The most expensive automation is the automation you haven't built yet. These are the patterns we see repeatedly.

The same runbook steps, executed manually, over and over

Database restarts, cache flushes, deployment rollbacks, cert renewals — tasks with documented steps that a human runs every time, hoping nothing goes wrong.

Incident triage takes longer than incident resolution

Engineers spend 20 minutes correlating logs, checking dashboards, and reading Slack history before they understand what's happening — then 5 minutes fixing it.

You know AI could help, but you don't know where to start

AI tools for ops are everywhere, but deploying them correctly — without creating new risks — requires experience. Most teams end up doing nothing.

What's included

Concrete deliverables — not vague "advisory" work.

Automation opportunity audit

A structured assessment of your ops workflows to identify the highest-value automation candidates by effort, frequency, and risk reduction.

Runbook automation

Convert your top-10 manual runbooks into automated workflows using Lambda, Step Functions, or your existing toolchain.

AI-assisted incident triage

LLM-powered incident summaries that correlate logs, recent deployments, and system state into plain-English context for on-call engineers.

Auto-scaling and auto-remediation policies

Event-driven automation that responds to infrastructure signals — scaling before you need it, remediating known issues before they page someone.

Infrastructure-as-Code migration

Convert click-ops and manual configurations to Terraform or CDK — so your infrastructure is reproducible, reviewable, and automatable.

Automated reporting and cost summaries

Scheduled generation of the weekly cost summaries, reliability reports, and deployment metrics that currently require manual assembly.

CI/CD integration for automation testing

Automated tests for your automation — so a change to a Lambda function doesn't silently break the incident response workflow.

AI tooling evaluation and integration

Assessment and integration of AI tools relevant to your ops stack: GitHub Copilot for infrastructure code, AI-assisted query generation, LLM-powered alert summaries.

How it works

A structured approach, not trial-and-error.

1

Toil inventory

We shadow your team for a sprint, documenting every manual, repetitive task with its frequency, duration, and error rate.

2

Prioritize and design

We rank automation candidates by ROI — time saved per month, risk reduction, and confidence level — and design the first batch of automations.

3

Build and validate

Automations are built with tests, documentation, and rollback procedures. We run them in parallel with manual processes until confidence is established.

4

Expand and maintain

Each month we identify new automation opportunities and maintain existing workflows as your infrastructure evolves.

What you can expect

Specific, measurable results — not "improved efficiency."

8–15h

Monthly ops hours reclaimed per engineer

Based on typical automation audits — hours currently spent on manual, repetitive tasks that can be safely automated.

75%

Faster incident context gathering

AI-assisted triage reduces the time from 'alert fired' to 'I understand what's happening' from 20+ minutes to under 5.

Zero

Manual steps for your top 10 runbooks

The tasks that require a human to babysit them at 2am become automated, tested, and self-executing.

Who this is for

This service works best for companies in a specific situation. Here's how to know if it's right for you.

Engineering teams of 3–20 peopleSmall teams are hit hardest by ops toil — every hour a senior engineer spends on manual tasks is a disproportionate loss.
SaaS companies with a growing ops burdenAs you scale from 100 to 10,000 customers, ops work grows faster than your team. Automation is how you close that gap.
Companies using click-ops with no IaCManual infrastructure changes are the highest-risk, lowest-leverage activity in your ops workflow. IaC is table stakes for automation.
Teams curious about AI for ops but unsure where to startAI-assisted ops tools are genuinely useful — but only when applied to the right problems in the right way. We know where they help.

Pricing

AI Enablement & Automation is included in the Growth retainer ($4,000/mo). Focused automation projects (runbook automation, IaC migration) are also available as standalone engagements. Advisory on AI tooling selection is included in the Strategic Cloud Advisory service.

Common questions

Ready to get started?

Schedule a free 30-minute discovery call. No pitch deck. Just an honest conversation about your cloud environment.