Mean Time to Understand: Rethinking Incident Response for the Agentic Era
For a decade we optimized mean time to resolve. Now agentic AI detects and remediates in seconds, so the real constraint in incident response is comprehension. Here is why delivery teams need a new metric, mean time to understand, and an operating model built around it.
Here is an uncomfortable truth for anyone running a modern delivery organization: the incident metric your leadership team reports every month is quietly going obsolete. We spent a decade driving down mean time to resolve. We bought the observability stack, tuned the alerting, ran the game days. It worked. Then we put autonomous agents into the loop, and the number we worked so hard to shrink stopped telling us anything useful.
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