What it does
Incident update drafts
Draft in the incident editor drafts the next customer update: a title, severity, status, affected services and a short message. It works from the incident, its earlier updates and its measured evidence. A message type or severity you already chose is kept. Drafts also work for messages on an existing maintenance window, from the message dialog. For an incident that Observer opened automatically, the first draft starts by itself the first time someone opens the incident, and is kept for later visits. Nothing is posted.Postmortem drafts
Draft in an incident’s Postmortem section fills in the facts from the incident’s own data: impact, timeline, detection, resolution and every number. These parts are computed in code, not by AI. AI fills only the summary, root cause, contributing factors and action items, and a person reviews and saves the postmortem. Postmortem drafts end with the incident’s evidence appendix.Translation of published updates
On a status page where you turn on Translate incident updates (page editor, Identity, under the page language), messages you publish in another language are machine translated into the page’s language. This covers incident and maintenance messages.- Translation happens after you publish. The original is never changed, and visitors can always show it.
- Translated messages are marked as machine translated on the page.
- A translation is rejected if it drops or changes any number or URL from the original.
- Subscriber notifications wait a short time for the translation, then send the original if it is not ready.
What it never does
- It never publishes. Every draft is a suggestion in the editor. A person reviews it, edits it and posts it.
- It never guesses the root cause. A draft cannot state a cause unless an operator update already stated it. A postmortem root cause is kept only when it quotes words from your own updates; otherwise the field is left for you to write.
- makes a causal claim that no operator update made;
- contains an internal identifier, such as an id, a key or a redaction marker;
- states a number (a time, duration, count or percentage) that is not in the incident or its evidence;
- says the issue has recovered while the evidence shows it ongoing, unless you are writing a Resolved update;
- says customers are still affected after a measured recovery.
What it sends
AI assist uses Anthropic as its AI provider. Anthropic is listed on Observer’s subprocessors page.
Translation runs only on status pages where you turn it on.
Turn it off
Open Settings, then Organization, and turn off Use AI assist in this organization. Any member of the organization can turn it off. Once it is off, only an organization admin can turn it back on. For other members the switch is locked with “Turned off for this organization. Only an admin can turn it back on.” This way one member cannot quietly start sending incident text again after someone else turned AI assist off. When AI assist is off:- the Draft buttons are hidden and no drafts are made;
- no new translations are made, and existing translations are hidden on your pages, in feeds and in notifications, which show the original text;
- nothing is sent to Anthropic.
org.ai_assist_disabled when it is turned off and
org.ai_assist_enabled when an admin turns it back on.