Whether the DevOps shops like it or not, they are feeling the pressure from AI. They’re expected to move more quickly, alongside their dev counterparts. The gruntwork that used to take weeks can be automated away, leaving time for fast prototyping, so the managers think.
According to Google Cloud’s 2025 DORA State of AI-assisted Software Development Report, 90% of developers now use AI tools, and 25% are now working alongside AI assistants.
Users of the Spacelift Infrastructure-as-Code platform now have some help with this automation, thanks to a new feature offering a conversational interface that purports to explain what is going on with their IT operations, and even make changes on the user’s behalf if necessary.
“Platform teams are expected to respond at the speed of experimentation while still maintaining security, compliance, and operational consistency,” wrote Technical Senior Product Manager Tim Davis, in a blog item posted today.
It is an application that essentially provides a spatial awareness of your infrastructure. It has access to your assets, all the building blocks inside Spacelift.
Lift Off
Spacelift’s eponymously-named flagship orchestration platform manages infrastructure-as-code (IaC)-style deployments.
Marcin Wyszynski, co-founder of Spacelift, in an interview with DevOps.com, described the core Spacelift package as “multiplayer mode for infrastructure,” allowing multiple DevOps personnel to collaborate across multiple IaC tools.
When you have multiple people working on a project, there is a danger, without the proper toolset, that their changes could overwrite each other. “The moment you’re working as multiple people, you need some form of synchronization,” Wyszynski said.
Originally, Spacelift extended the capabilities of Terraform, and was grouped in an emerging set of tools known as TACOS (Terraform Automation and Collaboration Software).
Spacelift quickly expanded beyond Terraform into an IaC-agnostic platform that can also be used with other IaC deployment tools, such as Ansible, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and OpenTofu, an open source fork of Terraform (Terraform is now owned by IBM).
The new Intelligence feature builds off of a previous update from the company, the open source Spacelift Intent, released in September, provided a way to make changes in the infrastructure using conversational language. It essentially was an MCP server provisioned to execute changes on your infrastructure,” Wyszynski said.
Trust Incrementally
Spacelift Intelligence takes Intent a step further, in that it understands how your infrastructure is currently set up. It extends a new conversational interface that provides specific system-level information.
“A common theme among many of our customers is that infrastructure is a big, difficult topic, and there’s so many moving parts to it, and Spacelift is in the unique position to connect all of those dots and provide a single layer of understanding of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it,”
Leveraging Spacelift’s core platform, Intelligence can be used by DevOps to quickly spin up prototypes and testing scenarios. It uses Claude Sonnet 4.6, though users can plug in their own LLM.
With this software users can:
- Ask questions about infrastructure state, changes and issues,
- Provision and manage infrastructure using natural language, while staying within policy guardrails,
- Receive AI-generated diagnostics,
- Cut onboarding time through guided learning.
Of course, businesses are not going to initially trust AI with their infrastructure, the very lifeblood of their business. The company set up its software to adopt incrementally, allowing users to build trust over time. Start with visibility, then move towards provisioning and automation.
Less Drift, Faster Experimentation
In his post, Davis shared some lessons the company learned from customers after fielding Spacelift Intent.
Cityblock Health, for instance, used Intent to get a handle on their infrastructure. Developers already had access to self-service infrastructure, but without central guidance or policy control, the platform team found all the deployments increasingly difficult to track. Intent eliminated the need for developers to understand the company’s cloud constructs. Instead, they deployed through natural language. The platform-defined policies kept everyone on the same page.
“For Cityblock, that shift was less about replacing Infrastructure as Code and more about changing how teams reached it,” he wrote.
For Vega, an asset manager platform provider, Intent brought the ability to experiment much more quickly, without touching production systems. It allowed developers and engineers to spin up new assets within a pre-defined set of guardrails, which ultimately hastened experimentation
Other Spacelift customers include Duolingo, Figma, Moody’s, Checkout.com, 1Password, and Redfin.
Spacelift will be demonstrating Spacelift Intelligence at its booth (#796) at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, being held next week in Amsterdam.