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sureops has two control modes that determine how much autonomy the AI exercises during an active incident. You can switch between them per-incident at any time, and you can configure the default per environment, per severity level, and per action type.

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Supervised mode

In Supervised mode, sureops drives the incident pipeline but proposes every action before executing it. After each stage completes, the AI presents its findings and recommended next steps and waits for your approval. Nothing executes until a human explicitly approves. This is the right starting point when you are:
  • Evaluating sureops against your environment for the first time
  • Onboarding a new environment where the AI hasn’t yet built context
  • Running high-stakes production incidents where you want maximum oversight
  • Building team confidence in how the AI reasons about your specific stack
When you approve a recommendation, the AI proceeds. When you reject or modify it, the AI incorporates your feedback and continues with the adjusted approach. Everything you provide — corrections, additional context, chat messages during a stage — carries forward and improves the AI’s reasoning for the rest of the incident.
Even in Supervised mode, sureops never requires you to use every stage. You can mark a stage as handled externally, skip forward, or take full manual control at any point. The AI adapts to whatever context exists.

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Self-Driving mode

In Self-Driving mode, sureops drives the full incident lifecycle without waiting for per-stage approvals. It monitors your systems, detects incidents, runs through detection → triage → diagnosis → resolution → verification → closure, and notifies you when it’s done — or when it hits something it can’t resolve on its own. You remain in the loop at all times:
  • Real-time notifications at key milestones
  • Full timeline visibility — every action the AI took, every tool it queried, and why
  • One-click “Take Control” at any point to pause the AI and step in
  • High-risk actions (destructive changes, production rollbacks) always require explicit approval regardless of mode — this gate cannot be removed
Self-Driving mode is appropriate once you’ve validated that the AI understands your environment and produces reliable diagnoses and fixes. Most teams reach this point after a few supervised incidents on non-critical environments, then expand the autonomy envelope as trust grows.
P1 and P2 severity incidents are never auto-executed without human eyes — even in Self-Driving mode with full auto-execute enabled. High-severity incidents always pause for human review before resolution actions run.

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Switching modes

You can switch modes at any time during an active incident:
  • Take Control — immediately signals the AI to finish its current operation and hand the incident to you. The AI doesn’t stop mid-sentence; it completes its current task, saves all findings, and pauses.
  • Release to AI — hands the incident back to autonomous operation. The AI picks up from the current stage with all context intact, including anything you added while in control.
The auto-release timer (configurable, default 60 minutes) returns control to the AI if you take control and don’t explicitly release it. You can extend the timer or disable auto-release for critical incidents.

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How the default mode is configured

The default mode is a policy, not a fixed setting. It resolves in this precedence order:
  1. Per-stage override on the current incident (most specific)
  2. Per-incident mode override
  3. Environment default (your staging vs. production environments can have different defaults)
  4. Organization default
  5. System default (Supervised)
You configure environment and organization defaults in Settings → AI Agents. Individual overrides are set from the incident hub.
The trust progression from Supervised to Self-Driving is always your decision to make — it doesn’t happen automatically. sureops surfaces confidence scores and audit trails to help you decide when to grant more autonomy, but the configuration change is always manual and always reversible.
Next: Quickstart — evaluate with a demo environment