Inside New Relic’s Agentic Future: CEO Ashan Willy on the Next Era of Observability

At New Relic Advance 2026 in San Francisco, one theme was impossible to miss. Observability is no longer just about seeing problems. It’s about fixing them. I caught up with Ashan Willy, CEO of New Relic, to talk about what this shift really means for customers.

The biggest highlight was the launch of their SRE Agent and the broader move toward an agentic platform. What stood out in our conversation was not just the technology, but the reason behind it.

Customers are overwhelmed by signals, alerts, and dashboards. They don’t need more data. They need faster action.

That is exactly what New Relic is aiming to solve. Closing the gap between insight and execution so engineers spend less time diagnosing and more time delivering.

Compared to last year, this feels like a real strategic inflection point. The conversation is no longer about adding AI features. It is about redesigning workflows around AI-native operations.

The big question now is not whether agents will assist engineers. It is how much responsibility they will take on as trust grows. If this launch works, by next year we should see fewer alerts, faster resolutions, and teams spending more time building instead of firefighting.

#Data #AI #NewRelic #Observability #AI #SRE #AgenticAI #TheRavitShow