Mercor Built An AI Agent To Automate SRE. Here’s What Happened

AI coding tools may have sped up development but SRE has remained a challenge for many teams. However, password management provider 1Password and Mercor, a startup that helps AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic train and evaluate AI models, today announced the results of a project in which the pair built and deployed an AI agent in 1Password’s environment to help automate SRE investigations.

The agent, which uses Codex as an execution layer, is designed to automate the investigation of engineering incidents. Mercor built an evaluation suite based on real engineering workflows, drawing on more than 300 historical incidents recorded across 1Password’s systems, alongside its deployment history and source code, to develop evaluation material that connects alerts to root causes and remediation actions.

Whenever a monitoring alert activates or an engineer reports an incident, the agent begins a Codex investigation, using its long horizon capabilities to identify the affected service, the responsible team, the most likely cause and the first action a human engineer should consider. According to Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, the agent has achieved a 95% accuracy across 78 different evaluation runs, and demonstrates a 57% lower median time to remediate.

More broadly, the project highlights how agents can be used to address reliability issues more efficiently, which has been a challenge across the industry. For instance, in 2025, software development lifecycle platform Harness surveyed 900 engineers, platform leaders and technical managers and found that while 63% of organizations are shipping code to production faster, 45% of all deployments linked to AI-generated code lead to problems, such as increased security and quality risk.

Automation and Evals

Many organizations are looking to AI to support the SRE function, with a Dynatrace survey of 919 IT leaders finding that half of SREs now use AI-powered capabilities for automating incident response.