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Overview

AI blocks solve the blank-page problem. Inside the Rootly retrospective editor, an AI block is a section, such as What Happened or Contributing Factors, that Rootly AI drafts for you from the incident’s own context. You decide which blocks belong in a retrospective by adding them to a template, and every retrospective created from that template generates those sections automatically. Every AI block shows the sources it drew on and stays fully editable. The recommended starting point is the Best Practice template — Rootly’s opinionated default, built from patterns across the millions of incidents managed in Rootly and the resilience engineering literature, with a blameless instruction set already wired into its AI blocks.

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How AI Blocks Work

AI blocks live in the Rootly retrospective editor, right alongside your headings, text, data blocks, and Liquid variables.
  • Each block has a purpose-built prompt. You don’t write it, you just add the block.
  • They pull context automatically. Every block draws on the incident’s metadata, its timeline, the incident Slack channel, and bridge-call transcripts (when captured via the Rootly AI Meeting Scribe), with no setup required.
  • They stay live in the document. Regenerate, edit inline, convert to plain text, comment, or rate.
  • Steer generation with custom instructions on the template.

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Key Capabilities at a Glance

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The AI Block Types

Rootly ships ten preset blocks, from Summary and What Happened to Contributing Factors, Learnings, and Curated Timeline, plus a custom block for any section you define with your own prompt. See the full list in Building AI Templates, and learn how to work with them in a document in Using AI Blocks.

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How Permissions Work

AI blocks respect your existing Rootly retrospective permissions. There is no separate AI permission system.
  • Anyone who can edit a retrospective can insert, generate, regenerate, edit, and convert AI blocks.
  • Observers (read-only users) cannot modify AI blocks. They can’t regenerate, edit, convert, or delete them, just as they can’t edit the rest of the document.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Rootly AI in Retrospectives is enabled from AI & Agents. Ask an Incident Response Owner or Admin with an Incident Response seat on the current team to turn it on. Once it’s on, AI blocks appear in the template builder palette and the editor’s slash menu.
From the incident’s metadata, its timeline, the incident Slack channel, and the bridge-call transcript (when captured via the Rootly AI Meeting Scribe). No other external sources are used.
Rootly AI warns you before regenerating a block you’ve edited by hand, so you don’t lose your changes by accident.
No. Incident context is used to generate your draft and is not used to fine-tune base models.

Building AI Templates

Add AI blocks to a template and preview them against a past incident before rollout.

Using AI Blocks

Insert, generate, edit, and regenerate AI blocks inside a retrospective document.

Using the Retrospective Editor

The editor AI blocks live in, with formatting, data blocks, Liquid, and collaboration.

Configuring Templates

How retrospective templates work.