333: How AI Is Transforming On-Call Life — The Future of SREs and IT Ops with Gou Rao, Co-Founder of NeuBird.ai

AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

Gou Rao is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of NeuBird, where he's building Hawkeye—an AI-powered site reliability engineer designed to identify, diagnose, and resolve IT infrastructure issues. He previously co-founded Portworx, which was acquired by Pure Storage for $370 million in 2020. In 2024, NeuBird raised a $22.5 million seed extension from M12, Microsoft’s venture arm, following a $22 million seed round led by Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures. Gou holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Bangalore University and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Gou Rao’s journey from late-night support calls to co-founding NeuBird and building Hawkeye, an AI-powered site reliability engineer.
• Why diagnosing IT issues is 99% of the problem—and how Hawkeye helps SREs move from noise to actionable insight in minutes.
• The shift from chatbots to agentic systems—and why reasoning, not just automation, is the next frontier for enterprise AI.
• How AI can reduce burnout by eliminating repetitive incident response tasks, freeing teams to focus on creativity and automation.
• The importance of transparency, explainability, and human oversight in deploying AI systems with agency.
• Gou’s reflections on entrepreneurship, including why “mistakes are an asset” and how jumping into the unknown can lead to your biggest breakthroughs.

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter: https://aiandwork.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• Connect with Gou on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gouthamrao/
• AI fun fact article: https://www.hrdive.com/news/anthropic-report-AI-software-engineers-automation-augmentation/739833/
• On becoming an investor and discovering amazing companies: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/7446373