Olivier Pomel
Co-founder-CEO of Datadog
Co-founder-CEO of the monitoring giant Datadog, who has pushed the company into agentic AI — shipping autonomous “Bits AI” agents that investigate incidents — while arguing observability is what will make AI systems trustworthy.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +6.1proBuilds AI professionally
- +1.7pro3 pro-AI statements (forceful)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Pro-AI · 7.8/10
In his words
Instead of staying in reactive mode — telling customers there’s an issue, waking them up, and making them fix it — we’re increasingly able to handle much of the fixing ourselves.
We see actually very good progress there and we can clearly see on the horizon the moment where the technology is good enough to be put into the hands of customers.
Biography
Olivier Pomel is a French software engineer who co-founded Datadog in New York in 2010 with Alexis Lê-Quôc, building it into one of the dominant cloud-monitoring and observability platforms and taking it public in 2019. His engineering roots are in systems and infrastructure — the plumbing that keeps large software running.
Betting Datadog on agents
Under Pomel, Datadog has moved aggressively into AI, releasing domain-specific agents — Bits AI SRE, Bits AI Dev Agent, and Bits AI Security Analyst — that autonomously investigate incidents, propose fixes, and triage alerts. Pomel argues the biggest productivity gains come not from flashy generation but from automating firefighting: incident response, false alarms, and system maintenance. Datadog has also positioned itself to monitor its customers’ AI systems, offering “LLM observability” for the new agent-driven stack.
Pomel is notably measured about the bar AI must clear. On Tessl’s “AI Native Dev” podcast he described what he calls the one lie customers tell you — that they would rather be shown the false positives and judge for themselves. Send two false alarms in a row, he said, and they turn the system off forever; the bar for precision therefore has to be very high, higher than for a human colleague making the same call. It is a builder’s optimism tempered by an operator’s caution: AI as a second pair of eyes that must earn its keep before it earns the keys.
Quote sources
- Frontier Enterprise, 2025(frontier-enterprise.com)
- Tessl “AI Native Dev” podcast, 2025(tessl.io)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/olivier-pomel
