The chapters before this one gave each function of the operations loop its rules. This chapter follows two organisations through twelve months of applying them, and it concerns all five operations functions: O1 Observe, O2 Diagnose, O3 Change, O4 Restore and O5 Sustain. It follows named people: at Nordvik Region the platform lead Maja Lindqvist, the duty manager Oskar Berg, the service desk lead Sara Ekdahl, the senior platform engineer Joakim Wester and the Head of IT and Digitalisation Henrik Dahl; at Hansa Mutual the head of Group Site Reliability and Incident Management Tobias Richter, the night incident commander and agent operator Ewa Kowalczyk and the head of the Polish service desk Katarzyna Zielińska, with Anja Weiß, Daniel Fischer, Thomas Brandt and Sofia Keller where their decisions are the point. The aim is to show what the rules look like when they meet a calendar, a rota and a bad Tuesday, and to ask what the year taught that the chapters could not.
The organisations, their people and every record in this chapter are fictional and illustrative, as EXAMPLE_ORGANISATIONS.md establishes. The instruments, the studies and the public incident reports that the chapter cites are real. Dates and identifiers that earlier chapters fixed are repeated without change; a date or a figure that this chapter adds is new and is entered in the ledger that the editorial team keeps. The method follows AI Purple, Chapter 27, which narrated a year of the purple loop, and carries over its finding that the first honest numbers are lower than the first dashboards (304, Nordqvist, 2026).
The year begins in September 2028, the month in which both organisations were asked the question that this book answers. On 2028-09-12 the regional executive committee of Nordvik Region asked its Head of IT and Digitalisation what operations becomes when the platform team's tools and the providers' AI act on the estate, and what the Region can prove about recovery (AIDR-0900). On 2028-09-19 the executive board's risk committee of Hansa Mutual asked its group chief information officer how far the autonomy of the IT-operations agent may extend, and what evidence the group would show a supervisor (AIDR-0950). Both asked for a first report by 2029-03-31. Month 1 is September 2028 and month 12 is August 2029.
Primary topics explored
- How to read the year
- Months 1 to 3: September to November 2028
- Months 4 to 6: December 2028 to February 2029
- Months 7 to 9: March to May 2029
- Months 10 to 12: June to August 2029
- What the year showed
About AI Operations
AI Operations is Book 10 of The Transformed Architecture. It takes IT operations as its subject and asks what happens when AI takes part in it: the five operations functions (observe, diagnose, change, restore, sustain), the autonomy budget and the Level 4 prohibitions, the observer principle, resilience as a claim that needs evidence, operating AI systems, the operator's own AI as Tier 0 and how to defend it, operating models, decision rights, regulation (DORA, NIS 2, the AI Act), and the people involved, for European enterprises and public authorities.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat, The Transformed Security Architect, AI Boss, AI Blue and AI Purple.
CIOs and heads of IT operations, SRE and platform leads, incident commanders and on-call engineers, service-desk and service-management leads, FinOps and capacity managers, architects, CISOs and heads of resilience and third-party risk, boards and management bodies, procurement and vendor managers, supervisors and auditors, works councils and unions, data protection officers, and public-sector leaders.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
Continue with the full chapter
Chapter 29: A Year in Operations: Nordvik Region and Hansa Mutual in AI Operations gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “Experience and Conclusions” and is one of 35 drawn from the manuscript.