MCP and SRE: Why the future of IT operations is agent-driven

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools?

In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a powerful new way to give AI agents deeper awareness of the tools, information and history they need to work effectively in the operations space. Unlike traditional APIs that just trigger functions, MCP adds a semantic layer of context that helps AI understand what to do, why it matters and how to do it better.

Whether you’re deep in site reliability engineering (SRE) or just curious about the next leap in AIOps, this episode unpacks how MCP could be the missing layer between today’s tools and tomorrow’s autonomous systems.

If you want to find out more, check out this piece by Zichuan at al, https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/mcp-critical-ai-driven-sre

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. My name is Ken McGrage. I am one of your regular hosts.
0:16.0	With me today is a longtime thought worker. Works a lot on our AI and so forth. I'll let him produce themselves.
0:21.5	Jishuan, you want to introduce yourself?
0:23.2	Hi, everyone.
0:23.9	My name is Juan.
0:25.0	So I joined Thawis about 18 years back.
0:29.0	In the past, like 18 years, I was like switching a lot of different roles.
0:33.5	I was into AI as about like three, four years back leading model AI solutioning at Thorex.
0:40.3	I focused on industry solutions.
0:43.3	Then I joined a managed service business at Thawracek called DAML, which is our main service business.
0:52.3	Right now I'm having the AI ops for our manor service business. Right now, I'm having the AI ops for our managed service business.
0:58.3	So usually we're signed like three-year deal with the customers. My job is to bring the AI
1:03.6	solutions into our IT operations, focusing on infrastructure, managed services, application managed services,
1:13.6	and also data managed services.
1:15.6	That's me based in San Francisco and MCP is a huge deal for me.
1:20.6	I recently wrote articles about MCP.
1:23.6	I'm excited about the breakthrough of AI technologies in the past like three years.
1:28.4	I really appreciate you joining.
1:30.2	And as you kind of hinted at there, I have a background in DevOps and SRE and that whole
1:35.0	movement.
1:36.0	And I know that we've interacted that way in the past.
1:38.8	But you recently did an article with a couple of our partners talking specifically about
	...

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