Everyday Questions
Below are examples of the exact questions you can ask Rootly AI in Slack, grouped by use case, and what you get back.Getting oriented
Look up people, teams, on-call
Page, escalate, run the incident
Write actions execute as you, with your existing Rootly permissions. Anything destructive confirms before firing.Action items, retros, comms
Search and lookups
More Complex Requests
Rootly AI in Slack can also run several operations at once to answer your question, and it reasons over the results to handle requests that don’t map to one specific ask.Critical timeline analysis
Ask Rootly AI “What’s missing from this timeline? Be critical.” Rootly AI reads the timeline, channel discussion, roles, and standard process expectations, then identifies gaps a senior responder would catch in a retro. Things like: no commander formally assigned, no root cause documented, the incident was resolved before the fix was merged, no status page update.Severity second opinion
Ask “was SEV3 the right call?” Rootly AI looks at the affected services, duration, the responder pattern, and customer-impact signals in the channel, then gives a nuanced opinion — pushing back when the evidence supports it.Extended retrospective conversations
Rootly AI supports back-and-forth conversations during a retrospective. Ask “what could have gone better?” → “how did comms look?” → “who should have taken what role?” → “similar past incidents?” → “was the severity call right?” → “how could we have resolved faster?” Rootly AI maintains context across the thread and pulls all the relevant data points to give you a picture from its perspective.Adaptive technical depth
Rootly AI adapts to the asker. “Catch me up” produces a structured exec brief. “Catch me up, I’m a Staff Engineer” produces a technical response naming the failing code path, the relevant error codes, and the race condition. Same incident, different audience.Multi-step actions
Rootly AI can chain multiple write actions in a single conversation. For example: “page the on-call for payments, then mark this SEV1, and create an action item to investigate.” Each destructive step confirms separately. The final reply summarizes everything Rootly AI did.What Rootly AI Can’t Do
- Writes only happen inside incident channels. The Slack side pane and DMs are read-only by design.
- Paging is through Rootly On-Call only. Even if PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or JSM Ops are connected elsewhere in Rootly, Rootly AI will not page through them.
- No production runtime actions. Rootly AI won’t run kubectl, roll back a deploy, restart a pod, or flip a feature flag. It can create an action item and page someone who will.
- No code generation or PR creation. Rootly AI doesn’t write code.
- Reactive by default. Rootly AI responds when asked. Proactive nudges and ambient listening are not part of the default experience.
- Slack-only for this surface. Rootly AI’s web features (retrospective AI blocks, meeting summary, Rootly AI in Web) are separate surfaces.
- It won’t invent data. If the answer isn’t in your Rootly data, the channel discussion, or a connected external source, Rootly AI says so rather than guessing.