AI Builders Global Conference 2026

Speakers

• Daniela Matinho - Senior Marketing Scientist at Snapchat

  Daniela Matinho is a data, analytics, and AI strategy leader with experience across Meta, PepsiCo, and Snapchat. Her work focuses on AI adoption, measurement, and translating emerging technologies into measurable business impact. She is also a speaker, writer, mentor, and judge who explores the future of work and the growing importance of human judgment in the age of AI.

• Stephanie Alba - Senior Solutions Architect at Databricks

  Stephanie Alba bridges the gap between AI strategy and execution. As a Sr. Solutions Architect and Machine Learning Subject Matter Expert at Databricks, she combines strategic technical leadership with hands-on engineering to help organizations accelerate their roadmaps and advance their AI initiatives. With over a decade of career experience in technology, Stephanie has consistently driven customer success and advanced the field's technical capabilities. As a former VP at a global advertising technology company, Stephanie developed the ability to balance executive-level strategy with deep technical execution—skills she now applies daily in helping customers navigate complex data and AI systems. She's the author of Databricks ML in Action, a comprehensive guide covering the entire ML lifecycle, and the creator of Databricks Skill Builder, a YouTube channel with nearly 3,000 subscribers. As a Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate, Stephanie will share her knowledge of MLOps, GenAI evaluation, and agent observability using MLflow. Beyond her technical prowess, Stephanie founded the SA Skill Building program and is known for her natural leadership, customer obsession, and ability to translate complex technical concepts into actionable strategies. She enjoys mentoring and empowering others. She's also advancing toward business-level bilingual proficiency, delivering technical training in both English and Spanish.

• Narmatha Bala - Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

  Narmatha Bala is a Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft with more than 15 years of experience building enterprise-scale software and AI-powered solutions. She works closely with customers and engineering teams to transform innovative ideas into scalable, production-ready systems. Narmatha is passionate about applying strong engineering fundamentals, responsible AI practices, and customer-driven innovation to deliver business impact. She is an advocate for women in technology and enjoys mentoring engineers and fostering inclusive, high-performing teams.

• Bhanu Chander Vallabaneni - Technology Director and Head of Core Engineering at Wellsfargo

  Bhanu Chander Vallabaneni is a Technology Director and Head of Core Engineering for Enterprise Risk, Audit, and Finance Technology at Wells Fargo. He leads enterprise data architecture and cloud data platform modernization, including designing lakehouse architectures and centralized data sourcing strategies for regulated financial environments. Previously at Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase, he holds an MS in Information Technology from Nagarjuna University.

• Summer Poletti - CRO at The Rise of US

  Summer Poletti is the founder of Rise of Us, helping founders avoid burning money, momentum and reputation of growth strategies that fall flat.

• Alex Layng - VP of Product at RadarFirst

  Alex Layng is the Vice President of Product at RadarFirst, where he leads the company’s product strategy and innovation initiatives focused on AI governance, regulatory risk management, and intelligent compliance operations. He has played a key role in evolving the RadarFirst platform from incident response to a proactive, AI-forward regulatory risk solution designed for organizations operating in highly regulated, high-trust environments.

• Alejandra Zapata - Senior Product Designers, Product Builder at Telos Labs

  Alejandra is a multidisciplinary creative and Senior Product Designer at Telos Labs, exploring how AI is changing the way we design and build products. She works hands-on with AI, code, and prompts to design and ship real products. She also co-hosts Designers' Tea, a podcast documenting the journey from product designers to builders through real experiments, mistakes, and lessons.

• Stefanie Francis - CEO and Founder at Hootology

  A former NYU professor who quit teaching her Global Market Research graduate course because she no longer believed traditional market research would truly serve her students, Stefanie Francis is an angsty innovator with a mission: radically reinvent how we understand people’s needs—and thus create better products, campaigns and strategies that positively impact humanity. As the Founder and CEO of Hootology, she's brought that vision to life with HOOQZ, a GenAI-powered digital platform where dynamic discussions in simulated environments to quantify qualitative information, allowing for a deeper understanding of the "whys" behind consumer decision-making at scale. As an award-winning speaker, a 'Forty Under 40' honoree, and a former graduate-level professor of Global Market Research at NYU, Stefanie is most proud of her ability to ask "how could we do it better?"—a question that led to her founding Hootology.

• Aakansha Vatsa - AI Support Engineer for business messaging and meta business agent at Meta

  Aakansha Vatsa is a Technical Support Engineer at Meta with 4+ years in the AI and business messaging domain. She works on platform integrations and frontline client issues for businesses generating millions in revenue through Meta's messaging products — which means she sees both the demos that work and the ones that quietly fail in production. She's based in Singapore.

• Ruta Deshpande - Senior Specialist - Full Stack Engineer at BNY

  Ruta is a software engineer and AI lead at a global bank, building AI systems for a regulated business line. Earlier work spans fraud detection and cross-border payments at major technology and financial firms. Ruta holds an Masters in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work sits where modern AI meets the regulated, decades-old systems that banks actually run on.

• Tess Robinson - Managing Partner at FTB Capital

  She is an investor and founder-performance strategist with a background in critical care medicine. She invests at the pre-seed and seed stages across diagnostics, mental health, neuroscience, longevity, and health AI infrastructure, while also working directly with founders on operational systems, sales, and sustainable performance. She has spoken at SF Tech Week, LA Tech Week, Art Basel Miami, and investment forums, bringing a practical perspective on building resilient companies and high-performing teams.

• Madhuri Somara - Product Leader, VP at Microsoft

  Madhuri Somara is a Product Leader at Microsoft focused on generative AI, AI agents, and intelligent customer experiences. She leads the development and scaling of AI-powered experiences that help enterprises transform how they serve customers, automate complex workflows, and drive measurable business outcomes. With experience spanning enterprise software, AI product strategy, and customer experience, Madhuri specializes in taking emerging technologies from concept to production. Her work focuses on the practical challenges of deploying AI at scale—including agent autonomy, human-AI collaboration, trust, reliability, governance, adoption, and value realization. Madhuri is passionate about the intersection of technology and leadership and regularly shares insights on AI transformation, agentic AI, product innovation, and the future of enterprise technology. She brings a practitioner’s perspective on what it takes to move beyond AI experimentation and build intelligent systems that work reliably in the real world.

• Zach Burnett - CEO at RadarFirst

  Zach Burnett is the Chief Executive Officer of RadarFirst, where he leads the company’s vision to help organizations operationalize AI governance, regulatory risk management, and intelligent compliance at enterprise scale. Under his leadership, RadarFirst is transforming how organizations govern AI by combining responsible innovation with intelligent automation, enabling customers to make faster, more consistent, and more defensible decisions in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.

• Jessica DelGrande - Cyber Security Research Consultant at Wells Fargo

  Jessica is a cybersecurity professional with experience in both healthcare and information security. She is passionate about protecting organizations, solving complex challenges, and helping others succeed. Outside of work, Jessica enjoys life on her family’s small farm and cherishes spending time with her partner and six children. Her commitment to service, family and continuous learning defines both her personal and professional life.

• Rumman Chowdhury - CEO & Founder at Humane Intelligence PBC

  Founder of Humane Intelligence - now Distinguished Advisor to the nonprofit and CEO of its spinoff Humane Intelligence PBC - and a former US Science Envoy for AI. A pioneer of algorithmic auditing and AI red-teaming (ex-Twitter META lead); one of the most-booked responsible-AI keynote speakers, headlining AI for Good 2026.

• Barr Moses - Co-founder & CEO at Monte Carlo AI

  Co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the agent trust platform, whose customers accelerate their AI transformation from piloting human-guided agents to deploying fully autonomous operations at enterprise scale. Backed by Accel, GGV Capital, ICONIQ Growth and Redpoint Ventures. A Databricks Data+AI Summit 2026 speaker.

• Sebastian Thrun - CEO, Dulo Technologies; Adjunct Professor at Stanford

  CEO of Dulo Technologies and an adjunct professor at Stanford. Founder of Waymo (Google's self-driving project), Google X and Udacity - a pioneer of self-driving cars and AI education. An Ai4 2026 keynote speaker.

• Surbhi Jha - Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA

  Surbhi Jha is a Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA focused on building production-grade AI systems and intelligent enterprise applications. Her work spans agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LLM evaluation, prompt engineering, and AI workflow orchestration. She has built and deployed AI solutions that integrate enterprise knowledge sources and automate real-world workflows, with a focus on reliability, answer quality, and measurable user impact. Surbhi is passionate about sharing practical lessons from building AI systems beyond the prototype stage and helping engineers design AI applications that are reliable, scalable, and useful in production.

• Arely Rivera - Lead Product Designer, Product Builder at Telos Labs

  Arely is a Lead Product Designer at Telos Labs with 7+ years of experience building digital products. Her work explores how AI is transforming product design, from designing experiences to working directly in code and shipping them. She also co-hosts Designers' Tea, a podcast documenting the messy, hands-on journey of product designers becoming builders through AI

• Vijaya Lakshmi Nukala - Technical Product Manager at Microsoft

  Vijaya Lakshmi Nukala is a Security Product Manager at Microsoft Entra, working across agent identity, workload identity, Zero Trust, and secure AI adoption. Her experience spans cloud platforms, cybersecurity, identity, and AI agents. Vijaya holds an engineering degree, an MBA from IIM Bangalore, and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. She regularly leads technical learning sessions that translate complex identity and security architectures into practical guidance for security, cloud, and technology professionals.

• Ashwin Krishnappa Kumar - Senior Manager, Data Engineering and Analytics at Tesla

  Ashwin Krishnappa Kumar is a Senior Manager, IT Applications at Tesla, Inc., with 15+ years of progressive experience in Data Engineering, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Enterprise Technology. He currently leads an engineering organization responsible for manufacturing intelligence platforms serving 15k+ users across 6 global factories and 247 cost centers, generating 10M+ platform visits. He is a builder and architect of enterprise-scale systems, from high-performance columnar data warehouses to RAG-based AI agents and mobile analytics platforms, each designed to eliminate operational inefficiencies and accelerate data-driven decision-making across manufacturing, service, finance, and energy domains. At Tesla, he led the consolidation of 1k+ legacy Tableau reports into a governed single source of truth, and architected Arcadia, Tesla's ClickHouse-based columnar data warehouse, achieving 10:1 data compression and sub-second query response. He also spearheaded the AI Manufacturing Analytics Agent, a RAG-based conversational AI enabling factory users to query manufacturing data in natural language, and led development of Tesla One Analytics, a mobile platform with 15k+ active users, a 1-day return rate, and 1.4-minute average session engagement. He holds a Master of Science in Information Technology and Management from The University of Texas at Dallas and a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Science from PES Institute of Technology, Bengaluru.

• Swarnamalya Mohan - Senior Full Stack Developer - AI/ML at FedEx

  Swarnamalya Mohan is a Senior Full Stack Developer in Applied AI/ML solutions at FedEx, focused on building scalable enterprise applications and intelligent technology solutions for logistics operations. She has experience across full-stack development, distributed systems, cloud technologies, and AI-driven applications, and is passionate about designing practical solutions that improve efficiency and user experience.

• Tim Brown - Strategic Data Advisor at Gold Mine Data

  Tim Brown is the founder of Gold Mine Data and a Strategic Data Advisor with over 45 years of experience in data governance, data quality, and data integration across major U.S. financial institutions and industrial organizations, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Truist. He now works with AI consultants, implementers, and technology leaders to establish the data foundations that make AI and automation projects safe and successful. He holds an MBA from The Ohio State University and a BS from The Pennsylvania State University.

• Mamta Krishnia - Group Director of Product Management at Group Director of Product Management

  Mamta Krishnia is Group Director of Product Management at Walmart International, where she leads a 50-member product team across Canada, Mexico, and Chile, owning a 9-figure e-commerce platform spanning search, personalization, fraud prevention, and promotions. Over more than a decade in retail and e-commerce, she has driven AI-powered initiatives including product recognition models and GenAI-driven service experiences, and played a key role in launching Walmart's Pet Medication MVP platform. She also founded Walmart's Women in Product employee resource group, growing it from 0 to 400 members. Mamta holds an MBA from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

• Effie Bersoux - Marketing Strategist & AI Consultant at GrowthGirls

  Growth marketing consultant and strategist, working with multinational organisations and high-growth startups. She specialises in bridging the gap between innovation and business impact in the areas of marketing, operations, and strategic decision-making. She is certified for Sustainable Marketing from the University of Cambridge (Institute for Sustainability Leadership). She is the CEO of GrowthGirls, a London-based growth marketing agency and the co-founder of AI The Academy, the educational platform that develops and delivers AI training programs tailored for professionals and corporate teams. She is an adjunct lecturer at NYU Stern Business School on the subject of Go-To-Market Strategy and AI for Business and serves on the boards of tech ventures and is a frequent speaker on AI transformation, Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

• Manisha Arora - Data Science Lead at Google

  Manisha Arora, Data Science Lead at Google I'm a data science and AI practitioner with 13+ years of experience leading teams and building systems that turn AI capability into real business impact — from ML models and experimentation to, more recently, agentic AI systems. In my current role at Google, I build agentic AI systems that power insights for some of the company's largest advertisers. I'm passionate about democratizing AI knowledge and helping others build the skills to keep pace as the field moves fast. I've taught 350+ professionals through my courses at Maven & PrepVector, and I'm committed to giving people the practical, hands-on skills needed to thrive as AI reshapes how products get built.

• Kavitha Govindarajulu - Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft

  Kavitha Govindarajulu is a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and cloud solutions. With over 15 years of experience designing, developing, and implementing large-scale enterprise systems, Kavitha partners with some of the world's largest healthcare and financial organizations to accelerate their AI transformation, from ideation through production. She is passionate about architecting scalable AI solutions and helping organizations adopt responsible, trustworthy AI practices that drive measurable business impact. A dedicated advocate for diversity and inclusion, Kavitha actively mentors women in technology and champions initiatives that empower underrepresented groups in STEM.

• Anushree Berlia - Software Engineer at Uber

  Software Engineer

• Marisa Tania - Software Engineer at PayPal

  Marisa Tania is a Software Engineer at PayPal who has led production AI and machine learning initiatives across large-scale payment systems. Her work applies AI/ML to complex financial problems, spanning ML-driven fee estimation and AI-enabled transaction rules engines, with a focus on reliability, scale, and measurable business impact.

• Nicole McCain - Founder, Chief AI Officer at Gentiv-AI Solutions

  Nicole McCain, Chief AI Officer and Founder of Gentiv-AI Solutions, also serves in the capacity of Corporate AI Trainer, Speaker, Board Member, and Future of Work Strategist helping small businesses, corporate teams, and women-led organizations adopt AI safely, practically, and productively. She has trained more than 5,200 business owners and team members on practical AI use. With more than 20 years leading multi-million-dollar operations technology initiatives for Fortune 500 companies such as JP Morgan and BlackRock, Nicole helps leaders build practical AI training, workflow readiness, human review standards, and clear data boundaries that protect decision quality and team capability. Nicole was recently honored by the University of Delaware's Blue Hen Innovation Fest, the FPI Women's Business Network, and Marquis Who's Who in America 2026 for her contributions to AI and business growth. She is also the author of The AI-Powered One Hour Workday, board member for the National Association of Women in AI, and founder of the 5 Million Women AI Initiative.

• Julieth Agbo - Founder at A-Aston Technologies Limited

  Julieth is an entrepreneur, AI and Data Governance Consultant, and Training Facilitator. She founded A-Aston Digitech, a company aimed at empowering individuals with tech and digital skills while supporting organizations with fractional operations support. Julieth is a STEM Educator role model.

• Kruti Baires - CEO/ Founder at TheSprintFit

  Kruti is the Founder and CEO of TheSprintFit, an AI native operating system for the early-stage start-up ecosystem. With ~17 years of enterprise tech experience, including time at Salesforce and Intuit, she's a product builder at heart, operating lean and hands-on across product, engineering, and fundraising. Third Speaker (Tess Robinson, tess@herconnections.ai - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tess-robinson/ Tess is the Managing Partner at FTB Capital Group, where she leads the Longevity Fund, investing in startups at the intersection of innovation, inclusion, and impact within human wellbeing. She believes the best investments come from founders who prioritize longevity over burnout.

• Katie Grover-Bennett - Founder at Instantial

  Katie is an independent AI Security researcher with over 10 years of experience at companies including Facebook and Coinbase. Her background in hyper-scale trust and safety operations has given firsthand expertise in how systems that are performing perfectly in local test can still leave users frustrated and confused by what happens. Her solution is to develop diagnostic methods for surfacing design failures before they become support tickets or trust problems.

• Nilesh Dhage - Director Product Management at Fidelity Investments

  Nilesh Dhage is a Director of Product Management, AI product leader, and author of AI Product Management: A Practical Guide to Managing Products in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. With 23+ years of experience across financial services, enterprise software, digital transformation, supply chain, and AI innovation, he helps organizations turn emerging technologies into trustworthy products with measurable business value. He is also an AI and technology research peer reviewer, hackathon judge, and mentor who supports builders, founders, and product teams in developing practical, customer-focused solutions. His expertise includes AI product strategy, responsible AI, enterprise architecture, systems integration, APIs, cloud platforms, and taking AI products from concept to production.

• Dr Seyi Ogebule - Founder at The STEMnologist AI Builders Fund

  Dr. Seyi Ogebule is an investor and startup advisor who backs AI builders in emerging markets. She is the founder of The STEMnologist AI Builders Fund, which gives non-dilutive grants to AI-native founders building for African users. She is a Dream VC Investor Accelerator Fellow, an angel investor across FinTech, EdTech, and infrastructure, and an advisory board member at early-stage companies.

• Aishwarya Shah - Doctoral Researcher at Westcliff University

  Aishwarya is a technology and business professional working at the intersection of AI, data, enterprise transformation, and responsible innovation. Her work focuses on translating complex technical systems into practical business solutions, with interests spanning AI governance, agentic systems, data strategy, and human-centered technology. She is also an AI researcher, published author, speaker, and technology community contributor, and a Founding Member of WomenTech Network. Through her work and thought leadership, she advocates for building AI systems that are not only intelligent, but trustworthy, explainable, and designed for real-world impact.

• Summer Poletti - Founder and CRO at Rise of Us

  Summer Poletti is the Founder and CRO of Rise of Us, where she helps founders avoid the GTM mistakes that fall flat and cost six figures to fix later. AI has made it possible for solo founders to build and launch fast, often with a lean or no team and no prior sales or marketing background — Summer is the startup advisor who steps in on GTM, building strategies that hold up under investor diligence, help founders raise, and help them spend that raise wisely once they do.

• Shamindra Peiris - Senior AI Product Manager at Visa

  Shamindra Peiris has 13+ years of experience and expertise in Machine Learning, Analytics and AI based Product Management across multiple industries and sectors ranging from Banking & Finance, Fintech, Agriculture and Manufacturing in North America and in South Asia. Currently she plays a key role in the Global Predictive Fraud Intelligence team at Visa as a Senior AI Product Manager, driving and leading the design and execution of Real Time payment Risk Analytics product suite. Further, she serves as an Adjunct Professor and a Program Advisory Committee Member for multiple colleges in North America and volunteers as a mentor for several Non-Profit organizations to uplift and guide young professionals and new immigrants in North America.

• Rimsha Touqeer Butt - Staff Software Engineer at Arm

  I am a software engineer working at the intersection of embedded systems, platform software, and infrastructure. Currently a Staff Software Engineer at Arm Ltd. in Cambridge, I lead release and support activities for a software stack to ensure reliable delivery of complex compute platforms powering next-generation AI workloads.

• Ashritha Reddy Epur - Manager, Customer Experience Data Science & Analytics at The Home Depot

  Ashritha Reddy Epur is a Strategic Analytics Leader at The Home Depot with a decade of expertise across Retail Media, Marketing, and Customer Experience. She specializes in building high-performing teams, scaling AI and data products, and translating complex data into executive strategy for enterprise-level digital transformations.

• Myrto Lalacos - Founder at The Emerging VC

  I've spent the last four years helping build what became the world's largest accelerator for venture capital firms. During that time, the Silicon Valley program I ran contributed to launching over 60% of the world's new VC funds every year. I worked directly with thousands of emerging managers across 13 cohorts, each of 350 fund managers, helping them go from idea to operational fund. I also built and ran the program that trained 1,800 individuals in the fundamentals of venture capital. Before that, I spent nearly three years as an investor at Praetura Ventures, an Emerging VC fund in the UK, and several years running Accelerate ME accelerator programs for student founders at the University of Manchester, which is now one of the largest student-run acceelrators in the country. Along the way I became a LinkedIn Top Voice for my content on launching, running, and investing in VC firms. I've posted consistently for years on everything from fund formation to LP strategy to the operational realities of running a lean Fund I. I write for the people doing the work, not the people watching from the sidelines. I care deeply about making venture capital more accessible, more diverse, and more honest about what it actually takes. Now I'm building The Emerging VC as an independently curated resource for managers preparing to launch or growing their VC firms. More on that here: https://theemerging.vc/

• Purva Porwal - AI Manager & Architect at State Street Corp

  Purva Porwal is AI/ML Manager & Architect at State Street Corp with decade of experience in the tech industry. Primarily contributing in various enterprise AI solutions design, Conversational AI and Natural Language Processing, she has driven impactful innovations across key industries such as finance and telecommunications. Her passion lies in harnessing AI’s potential to create meaningful transformation, and is constantly exploring emerging technologies in the field. Beyond her technical expertise, Purva is an active mentor, supporting and inspiring future professionals in the AI space. She plays an integral role in the AI community, contributing to thought leadership and fostering collaborative progress.

• Lukas Frei - Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI

  Lukas Frei is a Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, working on production AI systems and the practices needed to deploy them effectively. Previously, he was a Deployment Strategist at Palantir, where he helped turn complex data and AI challenges into operational workflows. His interests span applied AI, developer tooling, and the feedback loops that keep agent-built software reliable and maintainable.

• Charles Meruwoma - Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services

  Charles is a Senior Solutions Architect in cloud, AI, and enterprise design. He helps organizations scale AI and cloud solutions from prototype to production, with a focus on security, scalability, and business impact. Charles is passionate about building systems that deliver business value.

• Sumaiya Noor - Chief Product Officer at Mpowa

  Sumaiya has 15+ years of global experience in diverse leadership roles including AI Products and Solutions, AI & Digital Transformation, AI and Digital Strategy, AI Governance, Robotics (Physical AI), M&As and Talent Management. She has won many accolades throughout her career and has been honored as 40under40. Sumaiya also served on BOD of a global company. She made it to the list of Top 20 global Product Leaders of 2023 and she is recognized as Top 100 most influential women of Canada. She is on Claro Top 100 AI & Tech Leaders lists for 2024 & 2025 and is bestowed with Global Recognition Awards twice. Sumaiya also won Chief Product Officer of the year 2024 and is shortlisted for CPO of the year 2025. Based on her exceptional contributions and impact on AI and Product industry, research and global community, Sumaiya has been conferred with an Honorary Doctorate in AI & Machine Learning from Switzerland. She is also selected as Thinking About Thinking Global Fellow (invite-only) based on her AI, Computational Biology and Robotics research and impact. Currently she is Chief Product Officer at a category defining AI and Web3.0 company. Previously she served as Chief Product Strategy Officer and earlier she was VP of HR & Digital Transformation. She has worked with Telenor enabling them with their digital transformation. At IBM, she had 3 global roles and she led Technology M&As across 50+ countries in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa enabling IBM to be an AI & Cloud company. Sumaiya has scaled companies to 2X valuation and 3X in revenue. As part of executive team, she has closed millions of dollars of funding for companies. Sumaiya is a graduate of IBM Leadership Development Program. She is a Startup Advisor, Fulbright scholar with MS/MBA from Purdue University, INSEAD certified Digital Strategy Expert, Certified AI PM and an Engineer with experience of managing cross-functional teams across 6 continents (being based in 4 continents) with Fortune100 multinationals and tech start-ups. She serves on Harvard Business Review (HBR) Advisory Council, World Economic Forum’s AI Council and is on Canadian Web3.0 Committee (Canadian Blockchain Consortium). Sumaiya also collaborates with MIT, University of Toronto and University of Washington for advising portfolio startups across NA and globally specifically in AI, Ethical AI, Product, Technology and Healthcare domains. As a researcher, keynote speaker, and thought leader, Sumaiya contributes extensively to the global AI and Product community through publications, speaking engagements, media appearances, board and advisory roles. Sumaiya has a strong commitment to mentorship and has mentored 1000s of individuals across the globe. She is also a published author in high-impact peer reviewed journals. Her areas of research are AI based Product Development, Bioinformatics & Biotechnology, Machine Learning/Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Computational Biology and Cybersecurity. She speaks frequently at multiple forums globally. Sumaiya has spoken at US State Department with delegates from 47 countries including US Congress members. Also gave a talk at Grace Hopper Conference, attended by more than 40K technologists world-wide. Sumaiya has also been a Keynote speaker at University of Toronto and at several industry events including Google DevFest and IEEE. Sumaiya’s work has been featured in national and global media like Al Jazeera, Financial Post, National Post, Telegraph. Outside work, Sumaiya is a staunch supporter of women and human rights, education and health for underprivileged individuals and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She loves travelling, learning new things especially technology and history, meeting people from diverse backgrounds and experiencing new cultures.

• Raksha Hukkeri - AI Enablement Lead at CSafe

  Raksha Hukkeri is an AI Enablement Lead and Executive PhD student in Information Technology, with over seven years at the intersection of AI engineering and enterprise strategy. She began her career as an ML engineer building NLP systems and recommendation models before moving into AI product strategy giving her a rare foundation that spans the full stack from model to boardroom. A Carnegie Mellon graduate in Software Management, she has built production AI systems including Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and LLM evaluation frameworks, and driven measurable adoption across large organizations. Currently standing up AI infrastructure inside a regulated industrial company, Raksha brings a perspective few AI leaders can claim: someone who has engineered AI systems, shipped them to enterprise customers, and is now accountable for deploying them from the inside. She speaks on what it takes to lead AI transformation in the real world accountable for results, not just recommendations.

• Emre Okcular - Lead AI Deployment Engineer at OpenAI

  Emre Okcular is a Lead AI Deployment Engineer at OpenAI, where he partners with enterprises to design and deploy advanced agentic AI systems. His work focuses on Context Engineering and LLMOps practices that enable long-running, adaptive AI workflows in production environments. Emre previously worked at Google as a Solutions Architect, supporting global organizations on large-scale cloud and ML initiatives. He is passionate about bridging research breakthroughs with real-world business applications, and regularly collaborates with product, engineering, and customer teams to push the boundaries of enterprise AI adoption.

• Suresh Thenrajan - Director, Software Development at IQVIA

  Hands-on engineering leader with 22+ years in cloud and distributed systems, currently building production LLM workflows and agents in a regulated environment. Background in open-source platforms for data-intensive analytics, with recent work focused on where LLMs belong — and don't — inside systems that have to be auditable and right

• Neethu Elizabeth Simon - Staff Solution Architect at Arm Inc

  Neethu Elizabeth Simon is a Staff Solution Architect at Arm building optimized AI/ML/IoT solutions on Arm platform, specializing in Computer Vision and Edge applications. Previously she worked at Intel Corporation & has vast industrial experience(10+years) in building end-to-end IoT & AI/ML-based solutions across retail, industrial and healthcare domains for external customers and open-source developer communities. Neethu is an IEEE Senior Member and holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Arizona State University. She is passionate about learning new technologies, building solutions, and sharing them with others through presentations and workshops. Neethu is the recipient of 2025 Society of Women’s Pathfinder Award & 2023-Women Who Code–Applaud Her Award for leadership for her powerful technical leadership & STEM education advocacy.

• Anusha Dwivedula - Director of Product, Analytics at Morningstar

  Anusha Dwivedula is a Director of Product, Analytics at Morningstar, where she leads the development and modernization of large-scale investment analytics, ratings, and data products used across global investor workflows. Her work focuses on applying AI, data platforms, and governed analytics to complex financial decision-making, with particular emphasis on trustworthy AI, data quality, and agentic systems. She has published research on AI-driven data observability and trustworthy AI systems through IEEE and has spoken at conferences including CDAO Chicago, IEEE CAI, IEEE AI Test, Grace Hopper Celebration, and INFORMS Analytics+. Anusha is an IEEE Senior Member, an AI 2030 Global Fellow, a Forbes Technology Council member, and a mentor at the University of Chicago Polsky Center. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

• Nadia HANSEN - Global AI Strategist at Salesforce

  Nadia Hansen is a Global GTM AI Strategist at Salesforce, where she focuses on AI go-to-market strategy for the public sector. She's also an adjunct faculty at UNLV's Lee Business School and Nevada State University, where she teaches AI strategy and agent-building to executives, government leaders, and small business owners. Before Salesforce, Nadia spent 12+ years as CIO of Clark County, Nevada, where she led a technology portfolio serving millions of residents. Her path there wasn't linear — she moved through art school, a computer science degree, community college, multiple countries, and government leadership before eventually earning her MBA from UCLA Anderson and pivoting into AI strategy and education. That nonlinear path is a running theme in how she teaches: she's less interested in credentialed shortcuts and more in showing people how to actually build. She's delivered 100+ keynotes, including talks at CES, Dreamforce, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and has been recognized as a Top 50 AI Leader and featured in Inc. Magazine. She's a Salesforce Trailhead Ranger and Champion, and writes Hack to the Future, a newsletter on practical AI for builders and leaders with 3,500+ subscribers.

• Deepika Sidana - Senior Manager - Software Engineering at American Express

  Deepika Sidana is a Senior Engineering Leader at American Express with 14+ years of experience building large-scale software and AI systems. Her work focuses on production GenAI, agentic AI, RAG, AI reliability, evaluation, and responsible AI engineering. She is an IEEE Senior Member, published AI researcher, and Grace Hopper Celebration speaker, and serves in leadership roles with the Society of Women Engineers and getWITit. Deepika is the creator of the Enterprise AI Readiness Framework (EARF), an engineering framework for evaluating whether AI systems are truly ready for production beyond model accuracy.

• Robin Patra - Head Data, Analytics & AI at Keeley Companies

  Robin is a data and AI transformation leader who helps complex, high-consequence organizations turn fragmented operational information into trusted decisions and measurable outcomes. With more than 25 years of experience across construction, financial services, and supply-chain environments, he has led enterprise data platforms, AI governance, document intelligence, and workflow-automation initiatives. In construction, his work focuses on capturing experienced operator judgment, accelerating preconstruction and document workflows, and applying AI-assisted decision support to improve field-risk management, planned-work reliability, and margin protection. Robin’s approach combines data strategy, human-in-the-loop AI, operational adoption, and disciplined value realization—moving AI from experimentation into accountable business execution.

• Yossi Eliaz - Principal Engineer at Incredibuild

  Yossi Eliaz is a Principal Engineer at Incredibuild/islo.dev, building secure execution infrastructure for AI workloads: CI runners, sandboxes, snapshots, caching, and reproducible environments. He built the sandbox backend for LangChain Deep Agents (langchain-islo) and previously worked on container security at Twistlock.

• Madhura Chaganty - Engineering Manager at Elliptic

  Engineering Leader with 25+ years of experience across software engineering, leadership, and Enterprise AI. She leads multidisciplinary teams and helps move AI initiatives from early experimentation to measurable business value. Her experience spans AI operating models, evaluation, engineering effectiveness, and responsible AI governance. She is the author of the forthcoming book Foundations for Keeping AI Responsible: A Systems Approach to Accountable Decisions, which explores how responsibility can be designed into AI systems beyond deployment. She is also a conference speaker and actively champions women in tech through community leadership and mentorship.

• Gaurav Shah - Director - Staff Engineer at Fidelity Investments

  I am Director-Staff Engineer at Fidelity Investments, with 19 years of software development experience, 15 of them leading distributed engineering teams in investment banking, financial data, fintech, and enterprise platforms. My tech stack spans Full Stack Development, Cloud Native Architecture, AI Integrated Development.

• Saiteja Jonnalagadda - Senior Cloud Engineer at CVS Health

  Saiteja Jonnalagadda is a Senior Cloud Engineer at CVS Health who builds the large-scale data systems that keep AI reliable in a national healthcare environment. His work centers on patient identity resolution, data quality, and privacy-preserving engineering, the layer that decides whether the data feeding a model can be relied on. He has published peer-reviewed research on synthetic patient data and privacy-preserving record linkage, and he reviews for international IEEE and computing conferences. He speaks on why reliable AI is won or lost in the data long before the model.

• Renee Surratt - COO at SubcontractorHub

  Renee Surratt is the Chief Operating Officer of SubcontractorHub and an accomplished leader in technology, construction, and marketing. She has played a pivotal role in scaling the company and building AI-powered automation and agentic systems that help contractors streamline operations, make smarter decisions, and grow their businesses. Recognized by Marquis Who’s Who and the Marketing 2.0 Conference, Renee is passionate about practical AI innovation, authentic leadership, advancing women in STEM, and creating meaningful impact through technology and community advocacy.

• Tim Daly - Co-Founder and Chief Architect at PlusAI

  Tim Daly is the Chief Architect and Co-Founder at PlusAI, with over three decades of technical leadership experience in challenging domains, including AI, web search, machine learning, and distributed computing. His expansive body of technical contributions includes the web search architecture and machine learning ranking system of the third largest search engine in the world. He has also made significant open-source contributions to cloud infrastructure and programming languages, and received the best paper award at KDD. At PlusAI, he is helping to develop a new state-of-the-art virtual driver software, SuperDrive™, for factory-built autonomous trucks using deep learning and advanced AI techniques. He has over 80 issued and pending patents in self-driving technology.

• Vikram Nafria - LEAD DATA ANALYST at Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield

  Vikram Nafria is a data leader with over 15 years of experience in master data management (MDM), data governance, data quality, and analytics within the healthcare payer industry. His core expertise spans SQL-based data validation, business glossaries and data dictionaries, data quality indicators, HIPAA compliance, and PII protection, along with hands-on work in ETL tools such as Informatica PowerCenter, SSIS, and Ab Initio. He has served major healthcare organizations including Arkansas BlueShield BlueCross and Cigna, translating complex business requirements into reliable, compliant data solutions. As MDM Lead Data Analyst at Arkansas BlueShield BlueCross since September 2021, Vikram leads enterprise master data management initiatives across member, provider, and reference data domains. He partners with governance and compliance teams to define data quality standards, performs rigorous data validation using complex SQL queries, and has reduced production data defects by approximately 20%. His work on sensitive transactional healthcare data has contributed to a 45% reduction in privacy-related incidents, while his data reconciliation reporting has driven a 70% reduction in customer data incidents. Earlier in his career, Vikram supported Arkansas BCBS through a consulting role at Tetrasoft, optimizing Ab Initio graphs and SQL queries for healthcare data processing. During his tenure at Accenture supporting Cigna, he led QA teams of over 20 resources, optimized SQL queries to cut data loading time by 70%, and automated regression testing frameworks that boosted integration team velocity by 65%. He also worked with Independence Blue Cross and Bank of America on data migration, testing, and compliance initiatives. Vikram holds certifications including ISTQB Foundation Level, AHM250, SAFe Certified Scrum Master (Advanced), and HP ALM. He is pursuing a Professional Master of Applied Business Analytics at the University of Arkansas, building on his Bachelor of Engineering from Anna University. Vikram is committed to turning complex healthcare data into trusted, actionable insights that drive operational excellence and regulatory integrity.

• Lavanya Natarajan - Senior engineering manager at TD

  Lavanya Natarajan is a Senior Engineering Manager, AI and technology leader with over 18 years of experience leading enterprise software engineering, cloud transformation, and AI-enabled digital initiatives. She has led large engineering organizations delivering mission-critical platforms and is passionate about helping organizations transition from traditional software development to AI-native engineering. Beyond enterprise technology, she is the owner of Zebra Robotics Brampton East, where she mentors the next generation of innovators in robotics, coding, and artificial intelligence. Lavanya is an international speaker whose work focuses on Agentic AI, engineering leadership, and building AI-ready teams.

• Sowmya Podila - Senior Applied AI Scientist at Target Inc.

  Sowmya Podila is a Senior Applied AI Scientist at Target, where she develops and evaluates enterprise-scale generative AI solutions for retail. She led the evaluation of an upcoming AI-powered shopping assistant ahead of launch and contributed to TrendBrain, Target’s multi-agent AI platform for trend forecasting, which has been featured by CNBC and Retail Dive for advancing AI-driven retail innovation.  With over a decade of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning across retail, cloud, and enterprise technology, including roles at AWS and Gartner, her expertise spans large language models, agentic AI systems, AI evaluation, and deploying AI solutions at enterprise scale. Beyond her industry work, Sowmya is an AI advisor to nonprofit organizations and an active voice in the AI community. She regularly speaks at industry events, recently hosted the Generative AI Summit 2026 in Washington, D.C., and creates educational AI content, including a LinkedIn mini podcast series exploring how AI is transforming industries and helping organizations adopt the technology responsibly. Outside of work, Sowmya enjoys traveling, discovering new cultures, and embracing the adventures of life as a new mom. Connect with Sowmya LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sowmyapodila Instagram: @indigirl.ai

• Sabah Qazi - Senior Product Manager at Yelp

  Sabah is Product Manager Lead with 11+ years of experience building and scaling consumer and marketplace products used by millions. She specializes in growth and core experience, with a focus on personalization and AI-driven experiences that drive meaningful user and business impact. She has previously built high-impact e-commerce and discovery products at Walmart and in the travel tech space. She is on a mission to help professionals become AI-native. She has seen firsthand how big the gap is between people who've adopted AI into their daily work and people who haven't- it's a different level of output entirely. A lot of people still don't really know what AI can do for them. She's very passionate about closing that gap!

• Remi Ounadjela - Founder at Ounadjela Advisory

  Remi Ounadjela is the founder of Ounadjela Advisory, where he helps leadership teams decide where AI creates value and what to do next. He spent nearly six years at TikTok and, in his final role, led AI strategy for global Trust & Safety, working with 27 data scientists across three regions. He helped converge 11 LLM workstreams into one architecture serving 17 markets and established go/no-go criteria for production systems. He teaches TECH 75: AI and Accountability at Stanford, where professionals learn to evaluate use cases, evidence, deployment risk, governance, and agent behavior before deciding what to pilot, scale, restrict, pause, or reject.

• Vishvam Madishetti - SMTS Silicon Design Engineer at SMTS Silicon Design Engineer

  Vishvam Madishetti is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at AMD with 17+ years of experience in advanced semiconductor physical design, spanning leading-edge process nodes including TSMC N2P, N2, N3, FinFET, and Gate-All-Around (GAA) architectures. He leads physical design for AMD's Instinct MI and RDNA GPU programs, powering next-generation AI training and inference infrastructure. Previously at TSMC, he led implementation and closure of one of the industry's early subsystems on the N3 (3nm) node. His background spans AMD, TSMC, SoCtronics, Apple, Intel, and Texas Instruments. He holds an MS in Industrial Electronics from Bharathidasan University and a BS in Electronics from Kakatiya University.

• Shiphrah Wairima - President - Kenya at Global Council For Responsible AI

  Shiphrah Wairima is a Cybersecurity, Digital Safety, and Responsible AI leader dedicated to building secure, ethical, and inclusive digital ecosystems across Africa. She is the President of the Kenya Chapter at the Global Council for Responsible AI, where she champions responsible AI adoption and advocates for African perspectives in global technology governance conversations. With expertise spanning cybersecurity operations, AI governance, digital trust, and community empowerment, Shiphrah works with organizations, policymakers, educational institutions, SMEs, and communities to translate complex technology risks into practical, actionable strategies. Her work focuses on helping people navigate the opportunities and challenges of the digital age safely, responsibly, and confidently. Over the years, she has trained and mentored hundreds of aspiring technology professionals, supported individuals transitioning into technology and freelance careers, and delivered workshops, masterclasses, and keynote talks on cybersecurity, responsible AI, digital resilience, online safety, and emerging technology risks. Her areas of focus include: • Responsible AI Governance and Ethics • Cybersecurity Strategy and Security Awareness • Digital Safety, Media Literacy, and Online Trust • AI Risk Management and Human-Centered Technology • Workforce Development and Digital Skills Empowerment • Women in Technology Leadership and Inclusion • Community Cyber Resilience and SME Security As a recognized advocate for digital inclusion, Shiphrah actively designs and leads initiatives that bridge the gap between technology, policy, and society. She is particularly passionate about ensuring that underserved communities, women, youth, parents, educators, and small businesses have access to the knowledge and tools needed to participate safely in the digital economy. In addition to her work in Responsible AI, she serves as President of WomenTech Kenya, where she drives programs focused on increasing women's participation and leadership in technology, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies. Shiphrah is a sought-after speaker, trainer, moderator, and community leader who regularly contributes to conversations on AI governance, cybersecurity, digital safety, workforce transformation, and the future of technology in Africa. She is available for keynote speaking engagements, executive briefings, corporate training, panel discussions, advisory engagements, and community impact programs.

• Jayakumar Ramalingam - Staff Software Engineer at SiriusXM

  Jayakumar Ramalingam is a Staff Software Engineer and Cloud Architect with over 16 years of experience building cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, resilient APIs, and AI-enabled production systems. His work focuses on event-driven architecture, observability, platform reliability, personalization systems, and moving AI from experimentation into dependable production workflows. He contributes to technical communities through speaking, peer review, and technical program work. His perspective is grounded in practical engineering experience: how teams design, review, deploy, and operate systems safely when AI becomes part of the software delivery and production workflow.

• Tanu Jain - Security Engineer at Meta

  Tanu Jain is a Senior Security Engineer at Meta, where she builds AI-powered systems to improve mobile application security at scale. Her work focuses on AI-native security engineering, secure-by-default frameworks, application security automation, and using large language models to continuously understand software, detect vulnerabilities, and prevent entire classes of security issues before they reach production. She is passionate about transforming security from reactive vulnerability detection into continuous, AI-driven engineering and enjoys sharing practical lessons from building production AI systems.

• Sagar Chhatrala - Staff Security Engineer at Greenlight

  Security infrastructure engineer with nearly a decade of experience securing AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, identity, data platforms, CI/CD, and high-compute environments. Staff Security Engineer at Greenlight leading cloud and AI security across company accounts and protecting financial data for millions of families. CIS AWS/Azure benchmark coauthor and CrowdStrike Fal.Con speaker. I build secure-by-default platform patterns: workload identity, least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, policy-as-code, data access controls, agent/tool execution boundaries, and AI security guardrails.

• Shailee Shah - Product manager at Carvana

  Shailee Shah is a Product Manager at Carvana and a former founding product team member behind Arizona State University's CreateAI Builder, where she helped take AI-native products from 0 to 1 and scale them to more than 10,000 users. Working across research, design, strategy, and product, she conducted 80+ user interviews and helped turn complex AI experiences into tools that non-technical and skeptical users could trust. A former entrepreneur who transitioned from a non-tech career into AI product development, Shailee brings a distinctive perspective on building products people do not just try—but continue to use.

• Kaan Karakas - Applied AI Engineer at Delphi

  Kaan Karakas is an Applied AI Engineer at Delphi, the company's second AI hire. He scaled Delphi from 10k to 100k daily conversations, built agent memory and tool-calling into the production harness, and ships production MCP integrations and voice clones of real people. Previously at Salesforce AI; studied at NYU Courant.

• Zara Zamani - CPTO at 4+Ventures

  Dr. Zara Zamani is a technology entrepreneur, AI researcher, venture builder, and investor with over 15 years of experience building and scaling AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure companies. As CPTO of 4+Ventures, she works at the intersection of emerging technologies, venture creation, and commercialization, helping transform breakthrough innovations into globally scalable businesses. Alongside founding and leading multiple technology companies, Zara completed her PhD at Halmstad University, where her research bridges academia and industry through practical applications of AI and decentralized technologies. An internationally recognized speaker and thought leader, she regularly advises founders, investors, and enterprises on the future of artificial intelligence, innovation, and venture building.

• Smitha Gopinath - Director, TPM at ThoughtSpot

  Smitha G is Director of Technical Program Management (TPM) and Agentic AI SDLC Engineering Leader at ThoughtSpot. She is a technology leader, evangelist, innovator and strategist with a wealth of experience building and scaling complex technology platforms, driving large cross-functional initiatives and leading engineering organisations. She has worked with companies including Microsoft, Target, Amazon, Amadeus and Google and has held both technical program management and engineering leadership roles. At Google, she led strategic program portfolios across Ads, Search and YouTube with a strong focus on GenAI-powered products and platforms. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from AIT, Chikmagalur, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Hertfordshire, UK and has completed an Executive General Management Program from IIM Bangalore.

• Subha Shrinivasan - SVP at Rakuten

  The hardest problem in technology today is not building products. It is transforming complex technologies into scalable businesses that customers can deploy, operate, and grow with confidence. Anyone can build a product. Few can take it global, make it profitable, and turn it into a repeatable growth engine. That is the challenge I have spent the last 25 years solving across Datacenter, Cloud, Telecom, Open RAN, and AI Infrastructure. I build and scale the operating engines behind technology companies—from deployment and support to services, operations, and revenue realization. I view delivery not as a cost center, but as one of the most powerful levers for growth, profitability, and market expansion. Today, I lead the Global Delivery Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony, the world's first fully Open RAN telecommunications software provider. Prior to Rakuten, I served as Head of Customer Operations at Robin.io, a cloud-native platform company, where I led global deployment and operations for strategic customers and played a key role in scaling customer adoption of Kubernetes-based infrastructure platforms before the company's acquisition by Rakuten. Before that, I spent nearly two decades at HCLTech building and scaling global business units, managing P&Ls exceeding $200M, leading globally distributed organizations, scaling GCCs, integrating acquisitions, and delivering transformation programs for some of the world's most demanding technology companies, including Google, Meta, Dell, and Extreme Networks. My operating philosophy is simple: growth is created through execution. In a world focused on the next model, chip, or platform, I believe the enduring competitive advantage lies in an AI-first operating model capable of transforming innovation into adoption, scale, and durable revenue growth.

• Shirli Di Castro Shashua - Staff AI Scientist at Intuit

  Shirli is a Staff AI Scientist at Intuit, where she designs and builds production AI agents and agent platforms powered by LLMs. Her work focuses on agent architecture, memory, evaluation, LLM training, and incorporating expert and user feedback into AI systems. Her expertise also includes reinforcement learning, NLP, and classical machine learning. Shirli holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technion, specializing in Reinforcement Learning, and a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Ben-Gurion University.

• Urvi Bhandari - Founder | Futurist & Architect at What's Next Lab

  urvi is a futurist and architect who works where org, sell, market, and people meet. Two decades inside Fortune 10 companies (AT&T, IBM, Coca-Cola, Walmart), then twelve years and 400+ leaders moving people and organizations to what's next. She built her own AI-run operation as a solo founder, which is why she talks about AI adoption from inside the work, not from the outside. Founder of Getting to What's Next. Emory MBA.

• Julie Gilbert - CEO at Full Throttle Growth & Capital

  Julie E. Gilbert is a growth executive, AI strategist, company builder, and experienced public and private company board Chair, Vice Chair, and Strategy, Technology, Governance, and Audit member who works at the intersection of advanced technology, enterprise transformation, and governance. As Founder and CEO of Full Throttle Growth & Capital, Julie advises CEOs, boards, investors, and leadership teams on translating AI from visionary and technical possibility into measurable growth, productivity, and enterprise value. Her experience spans public companies, private-equity-backed businesses, founder-led organizations, and multigenerational family enterprises. She currently advises more than 50 private-equity portfolio companies, public companies, and multigenerational family offices and works across technology including an expert in AI, financial services and insurance, consumer, consumer products, cyber security, manufacturing, sports and entertainment, energy, and critical infrastructure. Previously, Julie was a Partner and certified Technology Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she served as a CEO-in-Residence and helped lead AI, IoT, and technology-enabled business building globally and across sectors. As a senior executive at Best Buy, she built and scaled five new growth businesses—including four that achieved billion-dollar valuations—and helped transform the company’s approach to customers, services, and innovation. She is also a founder/CEO of an early AI enabled company, a first of its kind globally in encrypted communications which she scaled to 178 countries and successfully exited. Julie is an active licensed CPA and an experienced board and committee leader with expertise spanning strategy, growth, AI, audit, risk, and governance. She serves on the Editorial Board of Private Company Director and is a regular author including her most recent “From Guardrails to Growth” and “AI Oversight Is Now a Full Contact Board Sport,” which challenge boards and executives to move beyond defensive AI oversight and build the leadership systems required to create value responsibly. She has been profiled more than 25 books and the focus on case studies and profiles by Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Business Week, IMD Switzerland, and many national periodicals. Currently, she is a 2026 Editorial Advisory Board Member for Private Company Director Magazine and was chosen as 2025 Top Private “Director to Watch” (1 of 30 board directors chosen based on referrals from CEO and Board directors). In addition, she was nominated by private equity firms who partner with her to be chosen as 2026 “Most Inspiring Entrepreneur of the Year” by New York Weekly and 2026 Marquis “Who’s Who.” She also is an NACD Board Governance Fellow. She is also 2026 50/50 Women on Boards to Watch (chosen from more than 300 highly accomplished women executives and board leaders) Julie has extensive involvement with the federal government. She has spent the past 15 years collaborating on special projects with the U.S. federal government in various departments. She has led the development of sophisticated technology platforms that power advanced intelligence, secure encrypted communications, and strategic initiatives and operations. She also introduces and assists with onboarding specialized technology and solutions to various departments. Her distinctive perspective connects the people building AI with the executives, investors, and directors responsible for funding, governing, adopting, and scaling it.

• Radhika Aitha - Manager statistical programming at IT Caps (Arcellx Pharma)

  Radhika Aitha is an accomplished statistical programming professional with more than 10 years of experience in clinical data management, statistical programming, and regulatory submissions within the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Throughout her career, she has specialized in supporting Phase I, II, III, and IV clinical trials, with expertise spanning study design, data standardization, analysis dataset development, and regulatory-compliant reporting. Her technical proficiency includes Base SAS, SAS/MACROS, SAS/SQL, SAS/STAT, SAS/ODS, SAS/GRAPH, R, Python, SQL, and CDISC standards including SDTM and ADaM. She also possesses strong knowledge of FDA regulatory requirements, including IND and NDA submissions, ISS and ISE preparation, and compliance with 21 CFR Part 11. Currently serving as Manager, Statistical Programming at IT Caps supporting Arcellx Pharma, Radhika leads statistical programming activities for clinical studies while overseeing project deliverables, resource planning, quality control, and stakeholder communication. She develops programming specifications based on Statistical Analysis Plans, supports FDA submission activities, performs exploratory data analysis using R, executes Pinnacle 21 validation, and contributes to project proposals and client presentations. Prior to this role, she held a similar management position at MMS Holdings, where she was responsible for statistical programming oversight, client engagement, and FDA submission support. Previously, Radhika worked as a Senior Statistical Programmer at Parexel International, supporting oncology studies for Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. In this role, she led statistical programming activities, developed CDISC-compliant SDTM and ADaM datasets, conducted data cleaning and transformation using SAS and R, created safety and efficacy datasets, performed quality control, collaborated with biostatisticians, managed project timelines and resources, and served as the primary programming contact for sponsors. She also gained extensive experience with Pinnacle 21 validation and regulatory terminology management. Earlier in her career, Radhika served as Lead SDTM Implementer at Sapere Data (supporting Cytel and Amgen), where she led CDISC implementation, SDTM annotation, validation, FDA submission preparation, transport file generation, and process improvement initiatives. She also worked as a Senior Applications Programmer at Procal Technologies, contributing to SDTM mapping, ADaM dataset creation, SAS macro development, clinical reporting, and analysis programming for clinical studies. She began her career as a Clinical Data Analyst at WeUMe Infosys, where she focused on clinical data analysis, data validation, statistical reporting, and preparation of tables and listings for clinical research. In addition to her extensive industry experience, Radhika has completed training in AI for Life Sciences, Machine Learning in Healthcare, Clinical Research and Data Management, Python, R, SQL for biological data analysis, AI/ML frameworks including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face, as well as NLP models and chatbot evaluation techniques. She combines deep expertise in statistical programming, clinical research standards, and regulatory compliance with leadership experience in delivering high-quality programming solutions that support clinical development and regulatory submissions.

• Prateek Jindal - Staff Software Engineer at Confluent Inc

  Prateek Jindal is a Distributed Systems Engineer with more than 10 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, multi-region data and streaming platforms. He specializes in distributed metadata systems, cloud control planes, operational automation, and production reliability. His experience combines deep architectural expertise with hands-on leadership across system design, development, testing, deployment, and large-scale operations. Prateek currently serves as a Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, where he is a founding engineer of the company’s next-generation cloud-native Kafka initiative. He has contributed to the architecture of a scalable Kafka control plane and data platform that separates metadata, compute, and storage layers to improve elasticity, regional isolation, high availability, and failure recovery. His work includes designing strongly consistent multi-writer metadata systems, stateless broker pools, automated partition routing, Kubernetes-native lifecycle management, and safe deployment strategies such as blue-green, canary, and wave-based releases. At Confluent, Prateek has also led initiatives related to configuration management, multi-region release automation, infrastructure scaling, observability, and operational excellence. His work helped reduce manual operational effort, improve deployment velocity, and establish reliability benchmarks through performance, soak, and chaos testing. He has defined service-level objectives, strengthened monitoring and rollback practices, authored operational playbooks, and mentored engineers across teams. Before joining Confluent, Prateek spent nearly six years at Amazon Web Services, where he contributed to AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, and Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager. He led the architecture and development of AWS Glue Interactive Sessions and worked on distributed control-plane services using technologies such as ECS, Fargate, DynamoDB, SQS, S3, AWS Step Functions, and Apache Spark. He also led engineering teams, influenced architectural decisions, enabled CI/CD across microservices, and improved service monitoring and operational processes. As a technical project lead for Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, Prateek helped launch a large-scale service that supports the creation of training data for machine learning systems. He designed distributed microservice architectures for data ingestion, streaming, big-data processing, model training, and inference. His work also included computer vision and deep learning platforms for autonomous vehicle data, including LiDAR and camera sensor fusion, three-dimensional point-cloud processing, object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Earlier in his career, Prateek worked with Raymond James Financial and Capgemini. His experience included enterprise data management, Hadoop, Spark Streaming, Kafka, data classification, personally identifiable information masking, Java enterprise application development, web services, database development, automated testing, and Jenkins-based deployment processes. Prateek holds a Master of Science in Management Information Systems from the University of South Florida and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communications from Panjab University. His technical expertise includes Java, Python, Go, SQL, C++, Kafka, distributed databases, consensus systems, sharding, shared logs, cloud-native infrastructure, deep learning, and computer vision.

• Marliis Schneider - Founder & CEO at Makersquare

  Marliis Schneider spent seven years on Estonia's national rowing team and five as a Division I athlete at USC — the kind of environment where you learn fast that discipline and strategy matter more than raw talent. She applied the same logic to business. With an MS in Entrepreneurship from USC Marshall (cum laude), she became COO of EMERGE Media, led international program launches with USC's School of Drama, then joined Wise as a Senior Payment Operations Team Lead. She built her first company — Code Galaxy, K-12 coding education — without ever writing a line of production code. In 2026, she rebuilt the original MakerSquare coding bootcamp (founded 2013, acquired 2016) as an AI-first program in Austin. The thesis: the operators who understand problems most deeply build the best AI tools — not the engineers. Her students prove it every two weeks. She's Estonian-born, Austin-based, and still has not written a line of production code. Featured in Built In Austin and The Story Exchange.

• Ruchi Batra - Information Security Director at U.S. Bank

  Ruchi Batra is an Information Security executive and technology strategist with more than 20 years of experience leading engineering, identity, security, and digital transformation initiatives across the banking and insurance industries. She specializes in turning emerging technologies into scalable enterprise capabilities, with a particular focus on AI security, identity governance, and operational transformation. Ruchi has led complex, cross-functional programs spanning global teams, driving measurable business outcomes through modernization, automation, and strategic execution. A recognized speaker and thought leader, she has presented at the Grace Hopper Celebration, Columbus AI Week, and Open Source North. When not tackling technology challenges, she enjoys word games, music, and spending time outdoors.

• Véronique Özkaya - CEO at DATAmundi

  Véronique Özkaya is CEO of DATAmundi, a data-for-AI company focused on multilingual data collection, annotation, and evaluation for enterprise AI, with roots global language service. She is a regular conference speaker on leadership in the tech sector, business transformation, and trends in data for AI. Most recently, my article on AI's data blind spots has appeared in Forbes.

• Prashant Anilkumar - Founder at Beyond Singular

  Prashant Anilkumar is a creative thinking and AI strategist, speaker, writer, and founder at Beyond Singular, where he helps organizations and individuals adopt a creative mindset alongside AI, while preserving their human thinking and authenticity. He has spent more than 13 years in product management and innovation leadership roles at Fortune 100 tech organizations like Dell and HP. He holds an MBA, is the author of a forthcoming book on creative thinking, and has delivered several talks and workshops translating dense ideas on creativity, cognition, and AI, into tools and frameworks practitioners can use.

• Shruti Kalia - Principal at Capital One

  I specialize in leading enterprise AI, privacy, and platform initiatives that bridge engineering, product, legal, and compliance teams. Throughout my career at Meta, Capital One, Discover Financial Services, and McDonald's, I have translated complex technical and regulatory requirements into scalable engineering solutions that improve customer trust, reduce risk, and enable innovation. I enjoy sharing practical frameworks for building responsible AI systems and delivering high-impact technology programs at enterprise scale.

• Sara Golon - Senior Customer Solutions Manager at AWS

  Sara Golon is a Senior Customer Solutions Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where she partners with enterprise organizations to accelerate cloud adoption, AI innovation, and modernization initiatives. Before joining AWS, she spent more than two decades leading technology programs and delivering large-scale IT solutions across complex enterprise environments, giving her a deep understanding of both business and technical challenges. Sara is passionate about helping customers transform bold ideas into practical, scalable solutions and lasting business outcomes.

• Imaan Tariq - Customer Solutions Manager at AWS

  Imaan Tariq is a cloud transformation strategist and GenAI practitioner with 5+ years of experience at AWS, where she partners with ISVs to drive complex migration, modernization, and AI innovation journeys. As a Customer Solutions Manager, she specializes in guiding customers through the full generative AI lifecycle: from early use-case brainstorming to production-ready solutions - building deep trust through hands-on collaboration and technical curiosity. An active GenAI ambassador, Imaan is constantly experimenting with emerging AI tools and frameworks to push the boundaries of what's possible for customers, and has co-led hands-on enablement initiatives that have given hundreds of CSMs the tools and confidence to prototype real GenAI solutions alongside their customers. She has also co-authored multiple blogs on agentic AI and identity security published on the AWS Partner Network. A Software Engineering graduate of San José State University, she also holds four AWS certifications: Solutions Architect Associate, Cloud Practitioner, AI Practitioner, and Developer Associate.

• Omari Gaskins Jr. - Founder & CEO at DocuSOR

  Documentation is one of it not the most neglected spaces in software engineering. We refuse to take care of it but everyone can relate to the frustration of needing up to date docs when it matters but they haven’t been updated or tested for correctness in years. READMEs, onboarding guides, and operational runbooks are often treated as static artifacts. Over time they drift from reality — even as the platform itself evolves. However, as we incorporate LLMs and coding agents directly into our environments, the very same docs that we haven’t cared about, are the exact context agents are using to build our apps. In this talk, I’ll explore documentation as an unverified surface within Internal Developer Platforms, and explain why context retrieval and compression, are only two parts of a 3 legged stool.

• Ketki Yennemadi - Sr. Talent Development Partner at PointClickCare

  Ketki Yennemadi has spent her career helping teams move through the discomfort of change and toward genuine capability. As a Strategic L&D Leader and Senior Talent Development Partner at PointClickCare, she leads enterprise AI enablement, digital literacy, and responsible AI programs in healthcare, with a focus on turning workforce reskilling into a real alternative to the AI hiring race. Her work sits at the intersection of talent strategy and human-centered design, applying frameworks like Design Thinking to help leaders build internal AI capability instead of chasing it externally. A MEd graduate, published researcher, Prosci-certified change practitioner, and Azure AI-credentialed professional, Ketki brings equal parts evidence and empathy to every room she enters. She is based in Burlington, Ontario, and is passionate about shaping the future of work in healthcare.

• Hazal Ozturk - Sr. UX Designer at Bevaya

  Hazal Ozturk is a Senior/Principal UX Designer at Bevaya, an AI-powered insurance automation platform. She designs the human-in-the-loop review experience for AI-processed insurance workflows, which means she spends her days thinking about how AI output and human judgment interact. She's also been quietly rebuilding her entire design process around AI tools for the past year, mostly through trial and error.

• Saish Sali - Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead at Netflix

  As Netflix's machine learning footprint grew across dozens of teams and business verticals, models, features, datasets, and pipelines became increasingly siloed — effectively black boxes that even ML practitioners inside the company struggled to discover, understand, or reuse. Answering a simple question like "which experiments are running this model?" or "which models share these features?" required manual archaeology across disconnected systems.This talk covers how Netflix addressed this problem by building the Model Lifecycle Graph, a metadata-driven architecture that models ML entities — models, features, pipelines, experiments, and datasets — as interconnected nodes rather than isolated pipeline stages. Powered by a real-time Metadata Service (MDS), the graph enables lineage tracing, impact analysis, and cross-domain discovery at scale, turning ML metadata into a first-class infrastructure concern rather than an afterthought. I'll walk through the architectural decisions behind the graph model, the real-time ingestion design that keeps metadata fresh as ML assets change, and the tradeoffs of choosing a graph-oriented approach over traditional pipeline-centric tooling. Related blog post - https://netflixtechblog.com/democratizing-machine-learning-at-netflix-building-the-model-lifecycle-graph-5cc6d5828bb1

• Karina Mikucka - Sr Director, Digital Business Solutions at 1543 Group

  Karina Mikucka is an enterprise AI and digital transformation leader with 15+ years of experience across technology strategy, governance, and delivery. As Senior Director, Digital Business Solutions at Foundation Medicine, she built the enterprise AI strategy and governance foundation and drove AI adoption. She advises executives on Digital Transformation, GenAI and Agentic AI, and AI governance.

• Claire Schmitt - Senior Growth Manager at Preply

  Claire is a growth and marketing leader with a background scaling ecommerce and marketplace companies, most recently as Senior Growth Manager at Preply. She's spent her career building lifecycle marketing and CRM experimentation programs, and now works directly with early-stage founders on distribution and go-to-market strategy.

• Sherry Yin - Founder at First Impact Partners

  Xuerui (Sherry) Yin is a climate tech investor and venture builder with 10+ years of experience spanning investment banking, venture capital, and strategy consulting across Europe and Africa. She has led and supported transactions exceeding $100 million and founded First Impact Partners, an AI-native venture builder that has supported 16 startups in raising over $10 million and built a network of 1,000+ founders, investors, and ecosystem partners. Her experience spans four investment funds (combined AUM $2B+), where she has evaluated 650+ startups in the past 5 years and developed investment theses across industrial decarbonisation and bioeconomy. An MBA graduate from London Business School and an ACCA-qualified finance professional, she is passionate about mobilising capital to accelerate the commercialisation of climate hardware and deep tech solutions.

• Prashanti Pathak - Technical Product Manager at Costco Travel

  With nearly 14 years of experience in technology and product management, I have built my career turning complex challenges into scalable products that create meaningful customer and business impact. In my leadership role at Costco, I set product direction, influence strategic priorities, and lead cross-functional teams to translate ambitious ideas into measurable outcomes. A product enthusiast at heart, I am passionate about using AI and emerging technologies to simplify complexity, accelerate innovation, and build products that solve real problems.

• Hemang Upadhyay - Strategic Product Leader at LG Electronics North America

  Most organizations approach agentic AI as a model-selection or prompt-engineering challenge. In commerce, the more persistent problem is whether the agent has decision-grade information it can safely act on. Drawing on enterprise work across product information management, digital experience platforms, intelligent search, and AI-enabled B2B/B2C commerce, this session presents a practical framework for turning fragmented product data into a trustworthy foundation for AI agents. I will show why an agent can sound intelligent while still making poor recommendations, and why the failure usually begins upstream: missing attributes, conflicting sources of truth, unclear policy rules, stale availability, or no mechanism to express confidence and escalate uncertainty. Attendees will learn a five-part “trust layer” for agentic commerce: establish authoritative data contracts; define decision-critical attributes; constrain actions with policy and permissions; evaluate recommendations against realistic buyer scenarios; and observe failures so the system improves rather than silently repeats mistakes. The session will also cover the difficult realities teams encounter in production—legacy data inconsistencies, competing business ownership, incomplete taxonomy, and the pressure to launch before data is perfect. Rather than waiting for a flawless foundation, attendees will leave with a practical method to prioritize the data and controls that matter most for the customer decision at hand.

• Andrea Lin - Founder & CEO at PrimeIQ, Inc.

  Andrea is the Founder and CEO of PrimeIQ, an AI-native growth platform that helps enterprises compound smarter decisions over time — simulating markets, learning from past choices, and scoring outcomes against real-world results. At its core, we provide the services and solutions to bridge human judgment and AI precision across the highest-stakes growth decisions: new product launches, pricing strategy, competitive positioning, and capital allocation. Concerto Labs, a division of PrimeIQ, takes that expertise and offers 1:1 coaching to CEOs looking to sharpen their own command of AI — something no other enterprise AI coaching firm offers at this level of personalization. Concerto coaches are expert AI builders with deep enterprise experience who help clients find their "lightbulb moment" — moving from AI curiosity to AI-driven competitive advantage. The coaching bench comprises practitioners who have advised C-suites across the Global 1000, drawing directly from the frameworks powering PrimeIQ and from hard-won experience at the front lines of enterprise AI adoption. Andrea has spent decades working at the intersection of strategy, data, organizational effectiveness, and emerging technology. At Salesforce, she held leadership roles across go-to-market strategy, data, and AI, contributing to the early development and launch of Data 360 and Agentforce. She served as the Strategy advisor to the Office of the CEO and COO and led the company’s global next-generation Corporate Strategy team to help companies up-level with AI. Previously, Andrea founded and led Pareto Strategy for 20 years, advising Global 1000 companies, conglomerates, and venture-backed startups on growth, market expansion, product strategy, partnerships, and M&A. Earlier in her career, she established Kaiser Associates’ first Asia-Pacific operations in Seoul and Singapore. Andrea holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

• Sheetal Temara, PhD - Senior Cyber Security Research Engineer at Wells Fargo

  Dr. Sheetal Temara is a postdoctoral researcher, published author and Cyber & AI practitioner working at the intersection of offensive security, responsible innovation & workforce development. She serves as a senior cybersecurity leader in the financial sector with experience in application penetration testing, adversarial security, vulnerability validation and emerging technology risk. Her work is driven by curiosity about how technology behaves in the real world and how it can be made more secure and resilient. Temara holds a doctorate in IT and her research studied using AI to improve cybersecurity training through adaptive learning, realistic simulations and timely feedback. This work reinforced her belief that strong cybersecurity depends on both capable technology and people who have the judgment and confidence to use it well. She also contributes to the cybersecurity and technology community as a peer reviewer, speaker, mentor, educator and hackathon judge & aims to help create AI systems that are capable, resilient, accountable and worthy of human trust through her research, industry leadership and community work. Her broader work also reflects a focus on clearer thinking, stronger communication and human intention when working with AI.

• Shalini Sivasamy - Senior AI Engineer at New York Life

  Shalini Sivasamy is a Senior AI/ML Engineer with over 14 years of experience building agentic AI systems, RAG pipelines, and LLMOps solutions for regulated industries like banking and insurance. She recently designed and delivered a production-grade multi-agent LangGraph system with human-in-the-loop checkpointing and automated evaluation frameworks for enterprise deployment. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, has authored 15+ peer-reviewed publications, and mentors emerging AI builders through Technovation's AI Ventures Accelerator in partnership with UNICEF's Generation Unlimited.

• Parul Jain - Director of Product Management at Deloitte New Ventures, Technology and Innovation

  Parul Jain is an AI, product, and innovation strategy leader focused on building AI-powered products, new ventures, and scalable business solutions. With more than 14 years of experience across technology, telecommunications, mobility, fintech, retail, and e-commerce, she has led strategic product initiatives from concept to market, driving business growth, operational impact, and customer value. She is passionate about advancing product and innovation excellence through thought leadership, mentorship, and strategic advisory. Parul holds a Master of Science in Product Management from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering

• Sunita McCoy - Director of Quality Engineering at Pizza Hut

  Sunita McCoy has spent 20+ years turning “the QE team” into the reason nothing catches fire - leading global quality and reliability orgs of up to 350 engineers at Foot Locker, Advance Auto Parts, and MetLife, cutting mean-time-to-detect by 75%, and getting AI to do the boring parts of testing so humans don’t have to. She joined Pizza Hut as Director of Quality Engineering in 2026 with a new challenge: build a globally scalable Testing Center of Excellence from scratch, AI-first, without letting governance become the thing everyone bolts on after something breaks. By the time she takes the stage, she’ll have six months of real scars and real wins to show for it. She’s also spent years championing women in tech, because a good quality org - like a good team - should look like the world it’s serving. Come for the framework, stay for the very real stories about what’s already hit the ceiling.

• Laura Ahonen - CEO, Founder at Leida.ai

  Laura Ahonen is CEO and founder of Leida Tech Oy, a Finnish medtech company building the reasoning infrastructure behind medical device compliance. Before Leida she spent 14 years in product strategy, scaling digital products on three continents. She founded Leida in 2025 to encode regulatory logic as software.

• Mor Michaeli - Founding Solution Architect at Pump.co

  Mor is a Solutions Architect at Pump.co, where she specializes in cloud architecture and AI projects at scale. Her work spans customer architecture reviews, savings modeling, and the design of internal data pipelines that handle massive volumes of workloads. She is the author of the open-source Hyperscaler Radar suite and an inference prompt router, tools that help teams gain visibility into cloud spend patterns and optimize AI inference routing. Mor combines deep, hands-on engineering across compute, data, and AI services with a pragmatic, evidence-driven approach to cloud cost optimization. She has helped multiple teams significantly reduce cloud spend while maintaining or improving performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

• Rashi Agrawal - Head of AI at Hinge Health

  Every leader I know is making high-stakes AI decisions on incomplete information. Which tools to standardize on. Where to invest. Who to hire. What to sunset. And the models, the market, and the tools are all changing faster than any planning cycle you have. That's the fog. It doesn't go away by waiting. This talk is about how to lead when the ground keeps moving. Not with more research or bigger frameworks, but with a set of decision principles you can actually use: what to commit to, what to defer, how to make reversible bets, and how to protect your team's judgment when everyone above you wants certainty you don't have. You'll walk away with a leader's toolkit for the AI fog: a framework for classifying decisions, a rhythm for revisiting them as the landscape shifts, and permission to lead honestly through uncertainty instead of pretending it away.

• Andrea Coifman - Director of Software Engineering, AI Platform at NASDAQ

  A passionate technology leader with background in software engineering, data science, and AI, Andrea Coifman leads the AI Platform as Director of Software Engineering at Nasdaq in Vilnius. With a career spanning roles at Devoteam, Qlik, and Jabra, she has focused on creating impactful AI-powered solutions, from auto-clustering algorithms to personalized design tools, with her work being published in several conferences. Driven by a belief in technology’s power to solve real-world problems, Andrea holds a Master’s in Engineering from Aalborg University and an engineering degree from the Technical University of Madrid. She is also committed to fostering the next generation of tech talent, having mentored for multiple Women In Tech organizations.

• Sowmya Manjanatha - Director of software engineering at Oracle Health

  Energy-Aware AI: Rethinking AI Platforms for a Sustainable Future The rapid adoption of AI is driving unprecedented energy consumption. Data centers are consuming record levels of electricity, with global demand projected to reach 133 gigawatts by 2026, driven largely by AI workloads. At the same time, major technology companies continue to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in expanding AI infrastructure and data center capacity. While AI has dramatically lowered the cost of creating digital assets, it has also led to significant overproduction and duplication of content. The ease of generating text, images, code, and other artifacts encourages repeated computation with little visibility into its energy cost. Today, AI users understand token consumption, but have virtually no awareness of the energy required to produce those tokens. I believe this needs to change. Energy awareness should become a first-class concern of AI platforms, where every AI operation has a measurable energy footprint. Just as cloud platforms made compute, storage, and network usage visible, future AI platforms should expose energy consumption as a fundamental metric alongside latency, throughput, and token usage. Achieving this vision requires more than operational monitoring—it demands a fundamental architectural rethink. Most AI platform components today, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, vector databases, transactional databases, and NoSQL stores, were built on architectures designed for traditional applications. AI transformations are stored, retrieved, and processed much like conventional data, without optimizing for the unique compute, network, and storage characteristics of AI workloads. The next generation of AI platforms must embed energy optimization into the lowest levels of processing. This may require rearchitecting core platform components—including databases, storage engines, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines—to minimize compute, data movement, and storage overhead while maintaining accuracy and performance. This talk explores two key themes: Energy-aware AI — moving beyond token-based metrics to quantify AI processing in terms of energy consumption and making energy visibility a core platform capability. Rearchitecting AI platforms for sustainability — examining how AI infrastructure, data storage, retrieval engines, and processing pipelines can be redesigned with energy efficiency as a primary architectural principle rather than an afterthought. As AI becomes foundational to nearly every industry, improving model efficiency alone will not be sufficient. Sustainable AI requires rethinking the architecture of the platforms that power it, making energy optimization a fundamental design objective from the ground up.

• Anna Yordanova - Data & AI Manager at DXC Technology

  A Data & AI leader with over 20 years of experience driving enterprise-scale digital transformation across industries including aerospace, manufacturing, financial services, energy, automotive, and consumer retail. Holding a PhD in Management Information Systems, my focus is on turning complex, high-risk programmes into practical, measurable business outcomes — bringing clarity, alignment, and structure to multi-account, multi-team environments. Leading a high-performing team of Data & AI professionals across multiple global enterprise accounts, a significant part of my role involves shaping how teams work — building trust, removing friction, and creating the conditions for people to do their best work. Our team engagement score consistently sits well above the company average, which I consider one of the most meaningful reflections of the culture we have built together. Beyond delivery, people development is at the heart of everything I do. Having led hiring and talent development across multiple engagements, conducted hundreds of interviews, and mentored professionals at various stages of their careers — my belief is simple: leaders are truly measured by the success of their teams. Active in business development and AI strategy, I support client proposals and engagements, and contribute to driving external recognition. Our organisation was recognised as a Leader across all six quadrants in the ISG Provider Lens 2025 Snowflake Ecosystem study — a result that reflects the quality and consistency of our delivery. Key strengths: ▸ AI strategy, adoption roadmaps, and executive advisory ▸ Enterprise data platform modernisation — Snowflake, AWS, Azure ▸ Programme & delivery management for large-scale AI initiatives ▸ Pre-sales, solutioning, and proposal development ▸ Multi-industry expertise: manufacturing, energy, automotive, financial services, retail ▸ People development: team building, mentoring, and stakeholder management As WomenTech Chapter Lead for Sofia, Bulgaria, the focus is on building a local community where women in technology feel seen, supported, and empowered. WomenTech Network Leader of the Year Award recipient and mentor in the WomenTech global mentorship programme.

• Shweta Agrawal - Chief AI Product Officer at Boston New Technology

  Shweta Agrawal is an AI product executive, GTM strategist, startup advisor, and ecosystem leader focused on turning AI innovation into scalable business impact. She serves as Chief AI Product Officer at Boston New Technology and has advised hundreds of founders across Techstars, Startup Weekend, and leading accelerator programs. She is a 40 Under 40 honoree, Mayor’s Award Recipient, finalist for Startup Catalyst of the Year, and a two-time honoree among New England’s leading women in the startup ecosystem. Shweta is a sought-after speaker, judge, and mentor on AI, product strategy, agentic AI, and go-to-market growth and have spoken in many AI conferences.

• Arshdeep Sood - Manager, GTM - Solutions Engineering at OneTrust

  Arshdeep Sood is a privacy, AI governance, and digital trust leader who helps organisations figure out how to adopt AI without losing the trust of the people it affects. A Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) and a 2023 Tech Trailblazer honoree (Top Women in Media & Ad Tech Awards), her work has moved from privacy and data strategy into a question more enterprises are now facing: how do you govern AI systems that make decisions on their own? She's spoken on this across the US, APAC, Europe, and India, and is a frequent voice on AI governance, responsible data use, and the evolving relationship between technology, trust, and business growth.

• Anja Lee - Builder, Instructor, Coach at Likely Works

  I'm a product person, not quite an engineer, and I'm building Lectern: an AI agent that represents speakers and writes venue-specific positioning briefs. This talk is a field report from inside that build, which is still happening today. I'll show how I ship real features as a solo founder working with AI coding agents, and the discipline that keeps a generative product trustworthy. Every factual claim in a brief has to trace back to a confirmed source field. Unsourced claims get surfaced for human review, never silently kept or silently dropped. Prompts are versioned, and an eval suite blocks any change that starts fabricating. You'll see what worked, what broke, and where AI-assisted development still needs a human holding the line.

• Ewa Kleczyk - CDAO at Prolaio

  Dr. Ewa J. Kleczyk is a healthcare analytics executive with extensive experience spanning clinical trials, real-world evidence, digital biomarkers, and health economics and outcomes research (HEOR). She currently serves as Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Prolaio, a cardiovascular digital health company, and holds an executive-level role with WomenTech Network. She is also affiliated graduate faculty at the University of Maine. A frequent speaker and published author in her field, she is known for her thought leadership on women in technology and leadership, authentic storytelling, and building professional networks.

• Michelle Luan - Founder at Independent

  Founders pitch their product. Investors quietly price their risk. Drawing on years structuring M&A deals and evaluating early-stage companies, this session breaks down what capital allocators actually check before they commit to an AI startup, and how founders can get ahead of it. We cover where the real risk sits in an AI business, which of it a founder can remove cheaply before the raise, and how to reframe a pitch around the risks that move a term sheet rather than the features that don't. Finance-first, specific, and built for founders raising angel to Series A who want to understand the other side of the table.

• Lalitha Madhurima Gayathri Kolluru - Cloud AI Infrastructure engineer at Google

  As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale exponentially, the infrastructure required to serve them faces a critical efficiency wall. This session explores how Python serves as the primary control plane for massive AI workloads, demonstrating how a single parameter change in a Python line can optimize underlying serving frameworks like vLLM. We will illustrate how high-level Python code orchestrates complex techniques—such as PagedAttention, quantization, and chunked prefill—translating a simple flag into massive compute and memory savings across thousands of cluster machines, ultimately slashing latency and operational costs.

• Christie Green - VP of Customer Success at Nebius

  I've bought enterprise technology from inside Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Lowe's. I've consulted on it from inside Slalom, watching a wide range of companies get adoption right and get it wrong. And now I implement it — leading Customer Success for an agentic infrastructure company through an acquisition. Most people talking about enterprise AI adoption have sat in one of these three seats. I've sat in all of them, and the same pattern holds from every angle: the projects that succeed aren't the ones with the most capable model. They're the ones where someone insisted on proof from day one. This talk is what that pattern looks like in practice. The goal isn't another AI adoption framework, it's a practical model, built from three different seats at the same table, for measuring whether an agent is actually working in production.

• Merve Koca - LLM /Legal Counsel at UCD

  Qualified lawyer with 5+ years of experience across technology, data protection, digital media, intellectual property, and commercial legal matters. Experienced in drafting and negotiating commercial agreements, including SaaS, licensing, advertising, sponsorship, production, distribution, and media contracts, while working closely with business teams in contract-driven environments. Managed litigation files across intellectual property, trademark, compensation, and commercial law matters. Strong focus on data protection and privacy, with hands-on experience in GDPR compliance, data subject rights, lawful processing, consent, and privacy-related contractual frameworks. Advised on legal and regulatory risks related to AI tools, digital platforms, and content distribution, including intellectual property, privacy, and compliance considerations. Provided internal guidance on the compliant use of AI and data-driven technologies.

• Dilruba Malik - Senior Engineering Manager at Palo Alto Networks

  Dilruba Malik is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Palo Alto Networks, where she leads the IoT and Data Security QA team. She brings extensive experience in hands-on, end-to-end software testing, as well as a strong track record of building and managing high-performing engineering teams. Her career spans both large enterprises and startups, including roles at Microsoft, Cisco, RetailNext, and Hitachi. Dilruba earned her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a Master’s degree in Engineering Management and Leadership from Santa Clara University. A passionate advocate for diversity in tech, Dilruba is actively involved in Women in Technology initiatives, frequently speaks at industry events, and was recognized as one of 30 Outstanding Women in Engineering Leadership. Outside of work, she enjoys acrylic painting and exploring new places through travel.

• Mansi Mittal - Senior Product Manager at Microsoft

  Mansi Mittal is a Product Manager at Microsoft, where she leads AI-powered Search experiences for the Microsoft 365 Copilot App used by millions of customers worldwide. She works at the intersection of large language models, information retrieval, enterprise search, and AI-powered productivity, driving products from customer research and experimentation to global rollout. Previously, she built products at Visa, spanning consumer and enterprise platforms. Beyond her day job, Mansi is an active AI educator and speaker with a community of over 23k+ professionals on LinkedIn, where she shares practical insights on building AI products, agentic AI, and product management. She has spoken at global conferences, including WomenTech Network and She Code Africa, and has mentored aspiring product leaders worldwide. Mansi is passionate about helping teams bridge the gap between AI prototypes and production-ready products through data-driven product thinking and real-world execution.

• Pallavi Geddam - Enterprise Technical Architect at BlackDuck

  I'm an Enterprise Technical Architect at Black Duck, a software supply chain security company, where I lead the Salesforce architecture behind our lead to cash automation. Right now I'm designing the governance framework AI agents will have to pass before they're allowed to touch that pipeline: how much autonomy an agent must earn before it can score a lead or generate a quote. Outside work I'm pursuing my MIDS degree at UC Berkeley and building Pace, an AI powered life coaching app.

• Sonakshi Pandey - Sr. Solutions Architect at Databricks

  I am a Senior Solutions Architect at Databricks, dedicated to enabling enterprise customers to thrive in today’s data-driven world. With over a decade of experience designing and implementing impactful Data and AI projects, my passion lies in transforming complex business problems into innovative and scalable technical solutions. Having worked with two leading cloud providers -Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, I bring a unique blend of technical and customer-focused perspectives to every product I build. My background as a hands-on Software Engineer and Solutions Architect enables me to understand products deeply, from both engineering and user standpoints. This dual lens is my superpower, allowing me to craft solutions that resonate with customers and drive real impact. 😊

• Dr. Camille Dempsey - Executive Director at PennWest Center for AI and Emerging Technologies

  Dr. J. Camille Dempsey is Executive Director of the PennWest Center for Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Technologies (CAIET). Dr. Dempsey has received numerous honors, including being named a Faculty Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence through the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), an EDSAFE AI Alliance Catalyst Fellow, and a Critical Policy AI Fellow through Manchester and Loyola Universities. She was awarded a “20 to Watch” award in educational technology from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the state “Educational Technology Impact Award,” for her article, The spirit of the times: Virtuality culture and technology-mediated human presence from the Technology Education Research Journal through the Pennsylvania Association for Educational Communications and Technology Association (PAECT). Camille received the Ero W. Davidson State Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Technology & Communications from the Pennsylvania Association for Educational Communications and Technology (PAECT). Most recently she serves on the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH) AI Advisory Board and is a Critical AI Policy Fellow through Digital Innovation and Sustainable Communities (DISC). She is a recognized leader in advancing responsible and human-centered approaches to artificial intelligence and other technologies in education and society. Dr. Dempsey has also presented widely at local, regional, state, national, and international conferences.

• Kate Kollerer - Chief Operations & Technology Officer at Face Reality Skincare

  Kate Kollerer is the Chief Operations & Technology Officer at Face Reality Skincare, where she leads teams spanning Digital Product, e-commerce, IT, supply chain, manufacturing, customer experience, and business operations. She spends most of her time tackling the messy, real-world challenges that sit at the intersection of people, process, and technology. Kate currently leads Face Reality's AI Council and is focused on helping the organization turn AI from an interesting tool into a practical business capability. Her work centers on AI adoption, governance, change management, and identifying where technology can create meaningful impact without creating unnecessary complexity. A builder at heart, Kate enjoys translating emerging technologies into actionable business outcomes and helping teams experiment, learn, and scale with confidence. She brings an operator's perspective to conversations about AI, blending strategic vision with the realities of implementation.

• Alicia Retzlaff - Senior Leader, Customer Solutions at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

  Alicia Retzlaff is a seasoned technology leader with 20+ years of experience driving business transformation and customer success. Currently a Senior Leader at AWS specializing in ISV, Data & Analytics, and GenAI solutions leading a team of cloud transformation strategists covering a $5B+ annual portfolio. She previously held director roles at Very Good Security and Upland Software. Alicia combines strategic vision with authentic leadership to create sustainable business success through people-centered approaches and innovative solutions. Alicia holds 3 AWS technical certifications - Data Engineering, Cloud Practitioner, AI Practitioner.

• Elizabeth Moyle - Advisory Director - Intelligent Automation and Artificial Intelligence at Ashling Partners

  Elizabeth Moyle, an enterprise AI leader who has spent the last 25 years turning chaos into clarity. From the manufacturing floor to the boardroom, Elizabeth currently serves as Advisory Director for Intelligent Automation and Artificial Intelligence at Ashling Partners, a global leader in intelligent automation and agentic AI consulting that is transforming the future of work for enterprises worldwide. While everyone else is making slide decks about AI, Elizabeth is actually building the agent crews that everyone is talking about. She brings a unique perspective that the technology itself is just commodity infrastructure, and the real magic lies in knowing how to cut a human workflow into agent shaped pieces. With a track record that includes over $25 million in value delivered, more than 150 workflows automated, and major initiatives like a $440 million greenfield manufacturing project, Elizabeth brings serious operational depth to the world of AI. She is a Certified Scrum Master, a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and holds an Executive MBA. Recognized by Influential Women for her leadership in enterprise AI, she combines deep process expertise with decisive, action oriented leadership. Her core philosophy is that the human workflow should stay at the center of every AI deployment, freeing people from the tedious 30 to 40 percent of work that requires zero judgment, so they can focus on what actually matters. Honest, direct, and completely committed to making things work in the real world and not just in demos, Elizabeth is here to show us exactly how to build agent systems that deliver.

• Ritu Soni - Co-founder & CTO at Skillbrew.AI

  AI-written resumes and auto-apply tools have flooded every open role. Volume is up, recruiter headcount isn't, and resumes no longer prove anyone can do the job. This talk is a builder's view of what actually works now. We share what we learned running 5,000+ AI screening calls across 10 to 15 client deployments in staffing, fintech, and social-sector hiring: where AI screening genuinely helps, where it doesn't, and what changed for teams that cut their screening cycle from 23 days to 2. Practical, not theoretical, honest about the limits. You leave understanding how hiring changes when the funnel is broken and AI is on both sides of it.

• Jasmine Price - Founder & CEO at SYNRG.Ai

  Jasmine Price is the founder of SYNRG.Ai, a patent-pending decision governance platform for enterprise teams and AI systems. She previously led design operations at Airbnb, where she designed systems that enabled cross-functional collaboration, strategic alignment, and better decision-making at scale. Her work sits at the intersection of human centered design, organizational psychology, enterprise operations, and AI governance. She focuses on how AI can accelerate work without removing meaningful human agency.

• Rittika Jindal - Principal engineer at Thomson Reuters

  Rittika Jindal is a Principal Engineer at Thomson Reuters on the Content Innovation team, where she designs and ships production AI agents for legal products including Westlaw and Practical Law. With more than 15 years of engineering experience spanning databases, data lakes, and AI systems, she now focuses on the hard parts of taking agents to production: evaluation, MCP server design, and observability. She is a recipient of the AI Kiran Trailblazer Award, an active organizer of hackathons for women in tech, and a certified yoga teacher and mountaineer.

• Dionne Gordon - Head of Research and Market Insights at Correla Ltd

  Dionne Gordon is Head of Research & Market Insights at Correla, where she leads strategic research and market intelligence to inform product, commercial and growth decisions. With a background in research and insights rather than engineering, she has expanded her work into hands-on AI innovation, designing and building AI-enabled solutions that automate workflows and support decision making across the business. Her work includes developing an internal AI-powered market intelligence product from concept through to production and adoption, alongside contributing to Correla’s wider AI strategy and capability development.

• Soumali Roychowdhury - Director of AI/ML at BlueJ Legal

  Tax systems impact every individual, making the integration of AI into this space both highly influential and deeply complex. In this session, we will dive into the architecture of the traditional Retrieval Augmented Generation(RAG) and Agentic RAG systems designed to tackle these intricate tax workflows. We will focus heavily on the critical methodologies required to ensure strict factual accuracy, model grounding, and safe reasoning when deploying Generative AI in such a high-stakes enterprise environment. To close, I will share how we leverage large-scale user feedback and model performance traces to establish a continuous improvement loop, ultimately shaping the future of tax research.

• Kirya Francis - Chief Inclusion Impact & Sustainability Officer at Omnicom/Flywheel Commerce Network

  As artificial intelligence rapidly scales across enterprise commerce and data platforms, traditional, reactive compliance checklists are no longer enough to protect global brands from algorithmic bias and cultural friction. To build a truly resilient, inclusive AI strategy, organizations must pivot from passive lectures to proactive, gamified simulations that lower internal defenses and build genuine human trust. This session provides leaders with a practical blueprint for creating an "Inclusive Sandbox"—demonstrating how interactive learning and data transparency can bridge the gap between high-level tech governance, cultural trust, and long-term commercial velocity.

• Pimmi Malhotra - Head of Cloud Office at IBM

  Most AI initiatives start with technology. Ours started with a simple question: Why are talented people spending so much time navigating process instead of solving problems? Across organizations, experts are buried in approvals, handoffs, data gathering, status updates, and repetitive operational tasks. We set out to remove that friction by building AI agents that could gather context, orchestrate workflows, recommend actions, and accelerate decisions while keeping humans in control. The journey wasn't smooth. Some solutions delivered immediate value. Others failed because we focused on technology before trust, automation before adoption, and intelligence before user experience. Along the way, we learned that successful AI transformation is far less about models and far more about people, governance, and change management. In this keynote, I'll share what we built, the outcomes we achieved, the mistakes we made, and the lessons learned moving from AI experimentation to real-world impact. Attendees will leave with practical insights for identifying high-value AI opportunities, avoiding common pitfalls, and scaling AI responsibly across their organizations. Because the true promise of Agentic AI isn't doing work faster, it's enabling people to spend more time on the work that matters most.

• Wendy-Kay Logan - Founder and CEO at Data Alchemie Group

  Wendy-Kay Logan is a Chief Data and AI product executive, Fortune 10 business leader, and board member with nearly 25 years of experience scaling data-enabled platforms, driving global growth, and guiding complex transformations. At Google, she led P&Ls, launched its first monetized business messaging platform, and influenced strategy across the $140B Search Ads business. A former senior consultant at McKinsey & Company, Logan advised CEOs and public-sector leaders on product strategy, digital and AI transformation, and M&A. She has served on advisory and nonprofit boards, including the MIT Sloan Advisory Board and the Forte Foundation, the premier organization supporting female MBAs on their leadership journey. She is an AI Curriculum Advisor at Rice University and serves as program faculty for Santa Clara University's Black Corporate Board Readiness Program, where she co-leads the Cybersecurity and AI Priorities in the Boardroom session. Logan holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Rice University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

• Sarah Julia Kriesch - Senior Lead Architect at Kyndryl

  Sarah Julia Kriesch is working as a Senior Lead Architect regarding Hybrid Cloud at Kyndryl. She is an educated Linux System Administrator and studied Computer Science at the TH Nürnberg. She received the responsibility for the s390x port at openSUSE after her Bachelor Thesis at IBM and is Chair of the Linux Distributions Working Group. She wants to combine different hardware architectures based on Kubernetes for running applications for the correct use cases and - in combination with AI - on the correct hardware requirements (TPU, GPU, CPU, transactions).

• Ciara Twomey Nielsen - Global Rovo AI Practice Lead at Eficode

  Ciara Twomey Nielsen is the Global Rovo AI Practice Lead at Eficode, where she drives enterprise adoption of Atlassian's AI capabilities: from Rovo agents and MCP integrations to multi-agent orchestration patterns that transform how teams work. She leads a cross-functional practice spanning consulting, solution architecture, and go-to-market, helping organisations move from AI curiosity to measurable operational impact. With deep expertise in the Atlassian ecosystem and a developer-centered approach to tooling and integration, Ciara bridges the gap between platform capabilities and real business outcomes. She works with enterprise customers across Europe on AI strategy, Rovo deployment, and building the internal muscle for continuous AI adoption. Based in Sweden, Ciara is an active voice in the Atlassian community by leading the Malmö Atlassian Community group and speaking at events. She's driven by a simple belief: AI adoption is a cultural transformation, not just a technical rollout.

• Mahitha Sudhakar Voola - Senior Analytics Engineer at JLL

  Mahitha Voola is a Senior Analytics Engineer specializing in enterprise AI, agentic systems, and intelligent decision platforms. With 8+ years of experience across analytics engineering and machine learning, she explores how organizations can move from dashboards and insights toward AI-powered decision systems using LLMs, orchestration, and modern data architectures.

• Akshat Mishra - Lead Product Designer for Agentic Experiences at Docusign

  AI coding tools can turn a prompt into a working interface fast, but production teams need more than output. They need product context, visual quality bars, UX acceptance criteria, and human review that distinguish a useful experience from a generic demo. Akshat Mishra, Lead Product Designer for Agentic Experiences at Docusign, shares a designer-builder workflow for using AI without losing judgment. Drawing on a computer science background and product-design practice, he will show how teams move from an ambiguous bet to a credible prototype: define the user job, capture constraints in a taste.md, generate, critique, revise, and decide what requires human control before shipping. Attendees will leave with reusable prompts and review criteria for building agentic experiences that solve real problems, earn user trust, and feel intentionally designed.

• Riddhima Sejpal - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Instacart

  Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are transforming computer vision, but building accurate, scalable multimodal applications requires more than simply sending images to an AI model. In this session, I’ll share how we designed a vision-language AI pipeline that analyzes shelf images captured by Instacart Caper Carts to identify products and generate structured product intelligence. We’ll explore the key design decisions that helped us improve accuracy and scale product identification across multiple retailers. I’ll also share practical lessons in prompt engineering, designing multi-stage AI workflows, and improving the reliability of multimodal AI systems. Whether you’re building AI-powered retail solutions or other vision-based AI applications, you’ll leave with practical design patterns and engineering techniques for building robust multimodal AI systems.

• Jane Austin - SVP design at Contentsquare

  Context and culture are the two variables that decide whether AI in an organisation compounds good work or compounds confusion: Stanford's Digital Economy Lab published a study called "The Enterprise AI Playbook," looking at 51 internal AI transformations to explain why overwhelming majority of enterprise GenA I investments show no measurable return. They found that companies using the same technology and the same use cases still had transformation timelines ranging from weeks to years. They ruled out the tools as the cause and said the variable was org design and culture: How ready it was to change. Whether its processes could absorb a new way of working. Whether leadership was actually behind it. Whether the culture tolerated failed attempts along the way. were they able to change their operating model around the AI Culture is the judgment that decides what to do with what the system produces. Taste is experience plus strategy plus human intelligence, and it forms through the act of making: designing, shipping, getting critiqued, getting it wrong in ways you can eventually name. That's what lets someone direct an AI system with precision. It's also what lets a team catch confident nonsense before it ships. Culture is what makes AI transformations work - I will talk about how we are building this culture at contentsquare and give advice on what is working, and how to make your culture work for you Context is the structured, current account of what's actually true in a business: the data model, the source of truth, the decisions already made, the constraints that haven't changed. AI amplifies whatever context it has access to. Rich context makes an AI system's output something a team can trust and reuse. Thin or scattered context makes speed the fastest way to spread a wrong answer. Contentsquare's AIx group is building a context layer that works the same whether the tool is Claude, Copilot, or whatever comes next. Governance is built into the layer itself: who wrote something, what stage it's at, whether it's been signed off. Context delivers better, faster and cheaper AI outputs. And I will talk about the interplay of both and how to create a culture that build context I'll walk through how the two work together in practice: a five-stage prototyping model that puts a human judgment gate between an AI-generated hypothesis and anything that ships, and a front-matter governance model that stops "looks true" from becoming policy. Attendees leave with the five-stage model and the front-matter governance approach, plus one question to bring back to their own teams: when someone hands you AI-generated work, can they tell you exactly what's wrong with it, or only that something feels off?

• Thi Phuong Lan Nguyen - Digital Marketing Manager at LinkedIn Corporation

  Which specialized human workflows can an agent actually take over—and which ones only look automatable until you inspect the output? To find out, we ran a head-to-head experiment in a domain where failure modes carry seven-figure consequences. We built an autonomous agent, gave it the full workflow of a senior Bayesian modeler—prior elicitation, feature engineering, model fitting, diagnostics, and stakeholder reporting—and ran it against an experienced practitioner using the same data and brief. The domain was marketing mix modeling (MMM), the econometric framework enterprises use to allocate hundreds of millions in ad spend. The agent won on speed and cost. On standard statistical fit metrics, it was highly competitive. But on close inspection, its model was quietly, confidently wrong in ways that would have misallocated millions of dollars. The core insight isn't that the agent failed, but where. This wasn’t a knowledge or computation gap; it was a judgment gap. We uncovered a specific class of expert decisions that never show up in an accuracy metric, yet determine whether an output is safe to act on: Defensible vs. Optimized Priors: Choosing a prior you can defend to a skeptical CFO, rather than the one that merely yields the best mathematical fit. Causal Filtering: Dynamically excluding variables that are statistically significant but causally suspect. Operational Reality Checks: Recognizing when a well-fitting model implies an action the business physically cannot or will not take. Problem Reframing: Interrogating and reshaping the commercial question before writing a single line of code. This isn’t unique to marketing. The exact same judgment gap appears in clinical decision support, financial risk modeling, and legal analysis—anywhere a senior expert owns a workflow that looks compressible on paper. This session delivers a stage-by-stage post-mortem of our experiment. While the case study is econometric, the pattern applies to any team pointing agents at high-stakes expert work.

• J. Michelle Maraj - Founder at Vizibly.live

  Michelle is a data and technology enablement leader with 10+ years of experience helping organizations get more out of their data. Her career has spanned financial crime analytics in consulting, financial reporting at Lyft, and building the business intelligence function at Qwick. Across every role, her goal has been to ensure the right people have the right information, in the right format, at the right time. Michelle is also a Tableau Speaker Bureau member and co-leads the Data + Women US West Coast Tableau User Group, where she works to grow the number of women building careers in data and analytics. She mentors emerging technologists through TechWomen and sits on the advisory board of WAKE International, and she's spoken at conferences on topics ranging from dashboard design to career transitions into data. Most recently, she's turned her focus toward building her own data products: apps that make data more visual, personal, and approachable for non-technical audiences. She's passionate about lowering the barrier to entry in data careers, both through the tools she builds and the communities she shows up for.

• Hope Oluwalolope - Software Engineer at Microsoft

  Hope Oluwalolope is a Software Engineer at Microsoft, where she builds large-scale cloud infrastructure and automation systems. She cares deeply about engineering productivity and building solutions that are scalable and reliable. Through speaking, workshops, and mentoring, she enjoys translating complex technical concepts into practical insights engineers can apply right away, whether the topic is software engineering, cloud technologies, or emerging AI capabilities. Hope is an active leader in tech communities and she believes the best technical content is not the most polished. It is the most honest.

• Samantha Kwan - Director of Marketing at Myant Health (subsidiary of Myant Corp)

  Sam Kwan is a Toronto-based pharmaceutical and digital health marketing leader with over 15 years of experience building brands and commercial strategy inside some of the industry's most regulated environments. Sam has led AI-driven initiatives at J&J, including a likelihood-to-prescribe machine learning model that reshaped field force strategy, and a PAAB-approved AI chatbot for healthcare providers, one of the first of its kind in Canada. Most recently, Sam serves as Director of Marketing at Myant Health, building a cardiovascular wearable brand from the ground up. Sam speaks and writes on what it actually takes to bring AI into industries where trust, compliance, and patient outcomes are non-negotiable.

• Geetha Sivaraman - Sr Manager - Data and Analytics Engineering at Taco Bell

  Data and Analytics leader with 20+ years of experience driving enterprise transformation through data, analytics, AI, and customer intelligence across restaurant, technology, and financial services organizations. Currently lead consumer-facing and team-member-facing data and analytics initiatives at Taco Bell, enabling Customer 360, personalization, loyalty, operational intelligence, and AI adoption. Proven track record building high-performing teams, influencing executive stakeholders, managing multimillion-dollar investments, and delivering measurable business outcomes.

• Shifa Samreen - Senior Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce

  Senior Software Engineer with nearly 7 years building distributed and production AI systems infrastructure at scale. At Salesforce as Senior MTS, led the org-wide LLM evaluation framework for Agentforce- six-dimensional benchmarking, zero-hallucination architecture adopted across 3 product lines. At Amazon SDE-2, owned Invoice Flair- distributed AI pipeline on AWS serving millions of marketplace sellers, reduced inference costs by 99.9% ($3,200 → $3/month). At Société Générale, drove 100% API maturity across 16 production banking microservices; a company-wide first. Passionate about production AI engineering, the gap between what AI agents promise and what they ship, and building evaluation infrastructure that earns customer trust. Previous speaker at Amazon DevCon Boston 2023 and WebDevCon London 2024. Grace Hopper Scholar and MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp alumna.

• Amira Youssef - Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Ex Microsoft || Ex Bupa

  Chief Product Officer and AI Transformation Executive with 20+ years building AI-powered products, scaling global product and engineering organizations, and leading enterprise transformation across Microsoft , AI startups, and Bupa . As Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Bupa, led a 300-person Product, Engineering, AI, and Technology organization, owning enterprise product and AI strategy while leading enterprise transformation. Previously held senior product leadership roles across Windows, Azure, and Azure Edge AI, building products at scale. Recognized for building high-performing product and engineering organizations, launching AI-powered products from 0→1, and delivering measurable business transformation at scale. 2025 Chief Product Officer Awards winner, 2026 AI & Digital Transformation Leader nominee , and keynote speaker on AI, Product, transformation and leadership.

• Gayatri Tavva - Senior Data Engineer at Amazon

  Gayatri Tavva is a Distinguished Lead Data Engineering Architect at Amazon, building enterprise data platforms for one of the world’s largest workforces. Her work spans AI/ML pipelines, data governance, and regulatory compliance architecture on AWS, with a focus on the unglamorous but critical foundation every AI system depends on: trustworthy data. An international keynote speaker, Gayatri also mentors professionals transitioning into data and ML careers and is an active contributor to the Women in AI Governance community.

• Pearl Chen - Chief Commercial Officer at Xoople

  Pearl Chen is Chief Commercial Officer at Xoople and a global technology executive with leadership experience spanning Bain & Company, SAP, GE Digital, AWS, Microsoft, and venture-backed startups. Over the course of her career, she has led initiatives across strategy, M&A, international expansion, partnerships, sales, customer success, and commercial operations. She has built and scaled growth engines for enterprise technology businesses, helping organizations accelerate revenue, increase customer adoption, and drive business transformation. Today, she focuses on helping organizations turn AI and data innovation into measurable customer and business outcomes.

• Lori Fena - Co-Founder at Personal Digital Spaces

  AI governance usually stops at the policy document. The harder problem is building consent and data rights into the access layer itself, so terms are set, verified and enforced at the moment an AI system reaches for content. This session draws on a working model: the voluntary privacy framework that brought more than 90 percent of the commercial web into compliance in 18 months, without a mandate. Lori Fena, who built that framework as the founder of TRUSTe, walks through what made voluntary consent infrastructure reach adoption then, and what an open, machine-readable consent layer looks like for the agentic AI era now, where the entity requesting access is a bot and enforcement has to happen in production.

• Anubha Gaur - Executive Director of AI Engineering at Quest Diagnostics

  Most enterprises don't struggle to build AI pilots, they struggle to operationalize AI at scale. As organizations race to adopt Generative AI and Agentic AI, they discover the limiting factor isn't model performance. It's the absence of an engineering operating model that lets AI be delivered, governed, and improved continuously across a regulated enterprise. In this session, I'll introduce Enterprise AI Engineering an emerging discipline that turns isolated AI experiments into repeatable business capabilities; through the lens of building it from zero inside a large, regulated healthcare enterprise. I'll walk through three moves I had to make at once, not in sequence: scaling an enterprise AI coding assistant with usage data that proved real adoption instead of shelfware licenses; designing a governed enterprise agent platform with compliance built into its foundation from day one which is what let a high-risk, customer-facing use case go live safely alongside lower-risk internal ones; and standardizing an AI-native SDLC so every future initiative, has a repeatable, governed path to production. Rather than chasing the next model or tool, this session challenges leaders to rethink the engineering systems - platform engineering, governance by design, agent lifecycle management and developer experience that actually determine whether AI creates lasting enterprise value.

• Keyuri Anand - Director of Products at Applied Systems

  The next wave of insurance AI isn't a smarter search bar or a copilot bolted onto a CRM, it's AI that actually does the work: quoting, follow-ups, endorsements, renewals, first-notice-of-loss intake. Drawing on hands-on work building AI product strategy inside a leading insurance agency management platform, this talk lays out a practical framework for designing "AI employees" that agencies can actually trust, staff, and scale with.

• Uta Kapp - CEO at AllScout GmbH

  Uta Kapp has been a software engineer for 40 years. She has experienced many waves of technology, starting with the IBM PC, moving through the Internet and Cloud, and now AI. As a Scrum Trainer she has seen technology been applied. She helped train some of Europe's first practitioners in agile ways of working. What four decades at the front of technological change have taught her is that the hardest part of any shift is rarely the technology itself. It is the moment just before you begin. Today she helps people meet the AI wave without waiting until they feel ready, combining deep technical expertise with a real understanding of what holds capable people back.

• Vivian Wang - Founder & CEO at Growth Partner AI

  Vivian Wang is the founder of Growth Partner AI, a venture building AI-powered systems that help startups make clearer revenue decisions before they waste months on the wrong customer, message, offer, or channel. She brings over 10 years of experience across growth, marketing, positioning, and commercialization strategy. Before founding Growth Partner AI, Vivian was directly responsible for deploying more than CAD 50M in marketing and growth investment across major brands and technology-driven businesses. Her current work focuses on applying AI to founder decision-making, helping early-stage companies turn market signals, customer conversations, and assumptions into clearer go-to-market priorities. Growth Partner AI was selected as a Waterloo 50 company by Scale Up Canada and has supported two other Waterloo 50 companies. Vivian speaks about AI, commercialization, revenue strategy, and how builders can use AI not just to create more output, but to make better decisions.

• Lovina Dmello - senior infrastructure software engineer at Nvidia

  Lovina Dmello is a senior infrastructure software engineer on the Deep Learning Libraries team at NVIDIA, where she works on building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers the NVIDIA deep learning ecosystem. Before joining NVIDIA, Lovina spent four years at Apple on the Apple Payments and Wallets backend team, and three years at Oracle on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team. She earned her master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Georgia, where her thesis focused on ransomware classification using machine learning algorithms. Lovina shares her insights through research papers, open source projects, and writing on AI/ML security, adversarial machine learning, agentic AI systems, MLOps, LLMOps, AI/ML applications in various industries, TensorRT, deep-learning libraries, and infrastructure best practices.

• Sonam Kanungo - Staff Data Engineer at Replit, Ex-Crusoe, Ex-Netflix

  **Sonam Kanungo** is a data engineering leader specializing in building scalable data platforms that power AI, analytics, and business decision-making. **Most recently, she served as the Head of Data Engineering at Crusoe**, where she was the founding data engineering leader responsible for establishing the company's data engineering function and modern data platform from the ground up. Her work spanned data warehousing, analytics engineering, real-time data pipelines, and self-service analytics, enabling teams across product, finance, sales, operations, and AI cloud infrastructure to make data-driven decisions. Prior to Crusoe, Sonam spent nearly five years at **Netflix**, where she built and scaled data systems supporting the company's global payments platform. Her work contributed to improving payment reliability, detecting fraud patterns, and optimizing payment costs, including reporting initiatives that delivered millions of dollars in annual savings. Earlier in her career, she developed large-scale data platforms at **Mercedes-Benz Research & Development**, **Verizon**, and **Accenture**, working on connected vehicle analytics, telecommunications data processing, and enterprise analytics. With more than a decade of experience, Sonam has deep expertise in modern data engineering, including distributed data processing, cloud-native architectures, analytics engineering, and AI data infrastructure. She is passionate about building reliable, high-performance data platforms that transform complex datasets into actionable business insights. In addition to her engineering leadership, Sonam has contributed to the broader technology community by serving as a judge and reviewer for technology innovation awards and hackathons. She is passionate about advancing the field of data engineering, mentoring engineers, fostering data-driven cultures, and building the data foundations that enable the next generation of AI-powered products.

• Caroline Casey - Founder at GovernIQ

  Everyone's talking about vibe coding. Almost nobody's talking about what happens after the demo works. I've spent decades in digital product development, led engineering teams, and worked hands-on in AI - but I've never been a software engineer. Over the past year, I've built a production governance-focused AI SaaS platform solo: agentic workflows, edge functions, auth, evaluation and guardrails included. AI took me roughly 90% of the way. This is a practical account of how: the tools and stack I chose and why, how I structured the build so AI could do the heavy lifting, how I worked out what I didn't know - and where AI-assisted development delivers versus where it fails. I'll also share why building solo, free to explore and rebuild without coordination overhead, was often faster than a team would have been - and what that means for how product, engineering and design will work together.

• Priyanka Kukreja - Staff Product Manager at CodeRabbit, Inc.

  Trust is the bottleneck in AI agent adoption, not its capability anymore. When an agent can write production code, send emails, and make irreversible decisions on your behalf, "just check the output" is not a viable review strategy. Yet most teams treat explainability as an afterthought: a log dump, a reasoning panel, or a "show your work" toggle bolted on after the real product ships. This session introduces a practitioner's framework for building explainability that earns trust rather than just performing it. It's built from hands-on experience shipping AI code review at scale. You'll learn to identify the three conditions that make explainability non-negotiable. You'll also discover how to map your user's needs to the three distinct jobs they need to do — verification, debugging, and auditing, each requiring a fundamentally different product response. Finally, you'll walk away equipped to apply a 3-step framework (Audience → Layer → Workflow Moment) to design explainability products at scale.

• Arushee Garg - Senior Software Engineer at Linkedin

  Arushee Garg is a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn, where she builds production-ready agentic applications that power intelligent experiences for millions of users. She has worked on the development of an agentic system, designing architectures with agent orchestration, RAG, and large-scale experimentation frameworks to deliver generative AI–driven insights. Her career spans from backend product engineering—driving features that bridge architecture with user impact. Beyond her technical contributions, she is a dedicated advocate for diversity in tech, mentoring early-career engineers and championing initiatives such as TechWomen to help more women thrive in AI and engineering.

• ANKITA SANJAY CHATRATH - VP Corp Finance AI Enablement at State Street Bank and Trust Company

  Enterprise AI stalls when the data layer loses business meaning. Ownership blurs. Access drifts from intent. Quality rules live in too many places. Governance fragments across systems, teams, and tribal knowledge. Under that kind of pressure, AI products inherit confusion before they produce value. This lightning talk draws from the experience of building an AI-powered data marketplace inside large regulated enterprises, where data discovery alone solves very little. In this environment, data has to earn trust. People need to know who owns it, how it is governed, how it should be interpreted, and whether it belongs in high-stakes workflows at all. The session moves past the familiar idea of a data catalog and gets into what it takes to build a marketplace that AI teams, business users, and governance partners can actually rely on. It gets into the parts that usually stay buried: how to capture business-owned metadata with operational value, how to distinguish certified, draft, deprecated, and restricted assets, how to surface quality issues before someone consumes the data, how to tie access controls to business intent, and how to make ownership visible enough for accountability to hold as data moves into downstream AI use. It also looks at the shift from passive documentation to active infrastructure. In most enterprise settings, people still piece together data context through old reports, tickets, shared drives, relationships, and institutional memory. AI raises the cost of that fragmentation. When a person cannot tell which metric has approval, which source carries authority, or which dataset is safe to use, an AI system will only move faster in the wrong direction. It will retrieve, summarize, and automate on top of ambiguity. Using real implementation work, this session shows how a governed data marketplace can serve as the connective layer between data producers, business consumers, policy owners, and AI builders. It focuses on the metadata that matters most: ownership, certification state, lineage, quality thresholds, access context, usage constraints, semantic definitions, policy tags, and consumption patterns. Those elements give downstream search, analytics, agents, and AI workflows the context they need to operate with precision and accountability. The talk closes on the broader point: when AI-powered analytics runs on top of a trusted marketplace, the marketplace becomes far more than a place to find data. It becomes part of the control plane for enterprise AI readiness. The infrastructure choices organizations make now will shape whether AI adoption scales with trust and discipline, or whether every new use case reopens the same unresolved questions around meaning, ownership, and control.

• Aradhna Mangla - Senior Manager - AI&Data for Financial Services at Ernst & Young US LLP

  Aradhna Mangla is a leader in AI governance and strategic transformation advising global wealth and asset managers. With over a decade of experience spanning five countries and 30+ large-scale transformation programs at EY, she has built a reputation for translating complex AI governance challenges into practical frameworks for regulated finance. Independent of her client work, she is a published AI governance researcher — author of frameworks including RLCC (Responsible Language for Client Context) and WM-DSLM (Wealth Management - Domain Small Language Model) — whose original methods have been adopted to strengthen data foundations, improve governance, and enable AI at scale. She writes and speaks on AI governance, fiduciary accountability, and the future of human-AI collaboration in financial advice.

• Twisha Shah Brandenburg - Senior Design Leader at Target

  Most AI rollouts target the wrong layer of the organization. Leaders automate the easy, repetitive work first because it's the path of least resistance, but that work is the substrate on which judgment is built. Entry-level reps, low-stakes decisions, pattern exposure over time, these aren't inefficiencies waiting to be optimized away. Strip them out, and you remove the conditions under which junior people become senior ones. This talk introduces Decision Architecture: a framework for deciding where AI should take on a task and where humans need reps. Drawing on 20+ years building capability inside Target, Instacart, PayPal, and BMW, I'll cover the Two-Clock Problem (performance metrics move in 12 to 24 months, judgment takes 5 to 7 years, and most orgs optimize for the wrong one) and a five-lens framework for evaluating automation decisions before they hollow out your bench strength. This isn’t an anti-AI talk. AlphaFold is the model: AI absorbing a hard constraint while expanding what experts can do, not degrading it. The problem isn't automation. It's automating without architecture.

• Divya Balineni - Senior Lead - Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services

  Why do most regulatory penalties stem from gaps between periodic reviews? As fintech-turned-banks scale (SoFi, Varo, Square Financial), they face compliance demands static audit cycles cannot address. This session demonstrates an AI-Native perpetual Compliance Platform: autonomous agents continuously monitor FinCEN, OFAC, and BSA/AML updates, analyze impacts via semantic ontology layers, and auto-adapt compliance rules with full explainability. Ontology-drive entity resolution enables agents to interpret regulatory intent across operations. Attendees leave with an architecture for agentic compliance monitoring and strategies to transform compliance from cost center to competitive edge

• Ishween Kaur - Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce

  When a guardrail isn't sure, what does it do by default block or allow? That single decision separates a contained incident from a P0, P1 and P4. This talk argues for fail-closed guardrail design, grounded in incidents where the default is what mattered. The anchor story: a prompt-injection attempt that tried to make an agent leak internal function names. The injection judge held because it was built to fail closed. Uncertainty meant block, not pass. I'll contrast that with the fail-open temptation (block only when you're confident something is malicious), why it feels safer for UX and why it quietly widens your attack surface. I'll keep the tradeoff honest: fail-closed costs you false rejections and friction and there are places where fail-open is genuinely the right call. The goal is a decision framework which guardrails must fail closed (injection, PII, privileged actions), where human-in-the-loop belongs and how to design rejection so it's recoverable.

• MinJee Hahm - Lead Product Designer at formerly at Meta (Instagram)

  As AI becomes embedded in product development, the biggest opportunity isn't generating designs faster—it's reducing the organizational friction that slows teams down. Designers today spend countless hours waiting for design critiques, design reviews, accessibility feedback, and design system approvals before they can move work forward. What if AI agents could act as your first line of reviewers? This session explores how specialized AI agents can provide instant feedback on usability heuristics, design system consistency, accessibility, implementation feasibility, and product strategy, enabling individual contributors to make informed decisions earlier in the design process. Rather than replacing human collaboration, AI elevates it by handling predictable feedback, allowing teams to spend more time discussing product vision, customer problems, and strategic trade-offs. Attendees will learn how AI is reshaping design workflows, increasing designer autonomy, and changing the role of design reviews in modern product organizations.

• Pratiksha Patnaik - Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Google

  Pratiksha Patnaik is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Google, where she helps enterprises architect and optimize high performance AI infrastructure. She specializes in scaling deep learning models across modern hardware accelerators and open source distributed frameworks

• Adora Nwodo - Platform Engineering Leader & Author at Stack Overflow

  Adora Nwodo is a multiple-award-winning engineering leader and published author working across cloud, AI, and developer experience. Her work focuses on building intelligent platforms, distributed systems, and scalable cloud infrastructure. She has held engineering and leadership roles at Stack Overflow and Microsoft, working at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and organizational execution. She’s the author of seven books on cloud engineering, DevOps, and technology leadership and serves as executive director of NexaScale, a nonprofit whose mission is to expand access to technology education for African technologists.

• Maria Barros Weiss - Senior Expert in AI Platforms and European Programmes at Fraunhofer IAIS

  Europe has a strong AI research and innovation ecosystem, but turning AI capabilities into practical, deployable solutions remains a key challenge for many organisations. The European AI-on-Demand Platform addresses this gap by creating a central environment where AI resources, tools, services, expertise, and ecosystem actors come together. In this session, I will introduce the AI-on-Demand Platform and show how it supports AI adoption in practice, from available tools and services to use cases, onboarding paths, and partnership opportunities. The talk will provide a practical overview of what the platform already enables today and how it is evolving to support SMEs, startups, technology providers, and European innovation communities. The session will also explore the platform’s role in strengthening Europe’s AI ecosystem by making trustworthy and sovereign AI solutions more accessible, visible, and easier to adopt across sectors.

• Olga Mamlyga - CEO at Quantum Scouts

  Olga Mamlyga is the Co-Founder and CEO of Quantum Scouts, working at the intersection of quantum technologies, cybersecurity, and AI-driven infrastructure resilience. She focuses on how emerging technologies reshape digital risk, trust, and governance, with particular emphasis on post-quantum security, critical infrastructure, and scalable, secure digital systems.

• Saurabh Pitkar - Director Product Management, Agentic Commerce & Agentic AI at Dell Technologies

  Saurabh Pitkar is the Director of Product Management for Agentic Commerce and Agentic AI at Dell Technologies where he leads product strategy for commerce across all Dell transactions worth $115B+ annually. He is building agentic commerce for Dell integrating with LLM apps like Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT; marketplaces like BestBuy.com and is designing native AI agents buying on dell.com. He is enabling consumer, commercial and enterprise buyers to do commerce autonomously with Dell no matter where the customers are. With 12+ years spanning stints across Sequoia-funded logistics unicorn (Porter), supply chain and Fortune 50 enterprise, Saurabh builds at the intersection of agentic AI systems and large-scale digital commerce. Earlier at Dell, he led product strategy for unified and AI-ready commerce platform processing $115B+ in annual transactions. He holds an MBA from Duke University (Fuqua) and a B.Tech from IIT BHU.

• Marie Doce - Founder & CEO at Grounded AI

  Marie Doce is the founder and CEO of Grounded AI, a Northern California-based AI services firm helping organizations turn AI curiosity into practical implementation. She works with businesses and professional teams on AI training, workflow design, agentic systems, and responsible adoption, with a focus on making AI approachable for non-technical users. Her work centers on helping people use AI to reduce repetitive work, strengthen internal processes, and amplify the expertise they already have.

• Anusha Varadhachari - Mainframe Architect at Bank of America

  Anusha is a technology leader focused on applying AI to large-scale enterprise systems. She leads AI adoption initiatives, mentors engineering teams, and is building agentic AI solutions that transform decades of legacy application knowledge into searchable, explainable intelligence. Her work spans AI agents, RAG, GitHub Copilot, enterprise knowledge platforms, and modernizing mission-critical banking systems while making them more accessible to the next generation of engineers.

• Angela Byers - Sr. Director GTM, Microsoft Security at Microsoft

  Managers today are overwhelmed by an endless cycle of meetings, feedback conversations, talent development, and performance demands—while also being asked to drive AI transformation. AI presents an unprecedented opportunity not just to increase productivity, but to fundamentally reimagine the role of the manager from task dispatcher to growth catalyst. In this session, we will showcase top use cases for using AI to augment leadership capabilities, accelerate team performance, and drive adoption across the organization. You’ll see how AI can be used to surface unseen coaching opportunities, detect employee sentiment, and generate personalized feedback prompts. You’ll experience how AI can role-play difficult conversations—helping managers prepare for high-stakes discussions with greater empathy and confidence. With experience in scaling Microsoft AI businesses, leading marketing teams, and working as a career coach, the speaker will share tools and frameworks for using AI in coaching, performance management, and culture-building. Attendees will receive resources to help their teams implement AI with consistency and confidence.

• Tania Banerjee - Data Engineering Manager at Amazon

  Tania Banerjee is a Data Engineering Manager at Amazon, where she leads a team building AI-powered platforms for Reliability, Maintenance & Engineering (RME). Her systems monitor sustainability metrics, EV charger health, labor scheduling, and spare parts inventory across 1,400+ global facilities. Prior to her management role, Tania spent 3 years as Senior Data Engineer at Amazon designing the core architectures for FlowMS (water monitoring), HVAC intelligence, and refrigeration monitoring — collectively forming Amazon's Climate Pledge AI platform. Tania holds an MS in Geospatial Science from Missouri State University and a BE in Computer Engineering from University of Pune. She is a WomenTech Network Founding Member, ADPList mentor in AI and Data Engineering, and has over a decade of experience in data engineering, cloud computing, and AI/ML systems. Her work has been featured in Facilities Dive and Amazon's Sustainability Exchange.

• Pranjal Nawarkar - Business Intelligence Engineer 2 at Humana

  Pranjal Nawarkar works at a Fortune 40 healthcare organization in the United States, where she works at the intersection of data systems, and engineering. She builds scalable data pipelines and analytics solutions, and uses automation and AI to streamline complex business processes and drive measurable impact. Beyond her role, Pranjal focuses on how students and early-career professionals can turn access into opportunity. During her graduate studies, she treated university as a strategic platform, actively leveraging scholarships, travel grants, conferences, and hiring cycles to position herself early rather than react later. Her work combines execution with strategy: helping others translate their experiences into career growth, understand opportunity pathways, and make more intentional decisions. She is passionate about bringing clarity to career journeys and turning ambition into real progress.

• Sumithra Rajendra - Head of Product, Knowledge Operations at World Bank Group

  As organizations race to deploy AI, many discover that technical success does not guarantee adoption. Even the most capable AI products struggle when users question accuracy, relevance, transparency, or governance. Drawing from lessons learned introducing AI-powered experiences within a complex global organization, this session explores the factors that build or break trust in enterprise AI. From hallucinations and knowledge quality to stakeholder alignment and user expectations, attendees will gain practical insights for designing AI products that earn credibility and drive lasting adoption.

• Laura Beaulieu - Founder at GrowthLoops.io

  Laura Beaulieu is the founder of GrowthLoops, where she runs a marketing team of one human and 40+ AI agents built in Claude Code. A three-time VP of Marketing and CMO of the Year finalist, she has taught 1,700+ marketers and founders to build their own agent teams. She has no engineering background, which is the point: she builds in public so anyone can copy what works, and she is candid about what breaks. Her focus is the shift from managing people to directing human and agent teams.

• Yesha Patel - Enterprise Solution Architect at IBM

  Yesha Patel is an Enterprise Solution Architect at IBM specializing in enterprise AI, digital commerce, customer experience, and large-scale digital transformation. Her work focuses on translating emerging technologies—including generative and agentic AI—into practical, secure, and trustworthy enterprise solutions. She is an active technology speaker, mentor, reviewer, and community leader, contributing through IEEE and ACM initiatives and industry programs. Her interests include responsible AI, AI-powered commerce, digital identity and trust, cybersecurity, and the evolving relationship between humans and autonomous AI agents.

• Aiswarya Venkitesh - Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft

  Many organizations have moved beyond asking "What is AI?" and are now asking "How do we generate measurable business outcomes?" Yet many AI initiatives remain stuck in proof-of-concept mode. In this session, I will share real-world lessons from helping enterprises design, deploy, and adopt AI-powered solutions using Azure AI, Microsoft Fabric, modern data platforms, and Agentic AI architectures. Attendees will learn what worked, what failed, and the critical decisions that moved projects from experimentation to production. The session covers governance, security, data readiness, adoption challenges, ROI measurement, and practical strategies for scaling AI across the enterprise. Through customer success stories and implementation patterns, attendees will gain actionable insights for turning AI investments into sustainable business value.

• Akriti Bhat - Senior Software Engineer at Meta

  When AI agents move from sandbox chat windows into production systems, they gain the ability to execute real-world mutations: calling APIs, writing to databases, and spending enterprise budgets. The engineering risk isn't just that non-deterministic models hallucinate; it’s that teams treat agents like trusted internal systems instead of untrusted clients. This session provides a production-ready playbook for applying proven backend patterns to gate agentic tool calls. We will break down a tactical, three-lane decision model, Proceed, Abstain, and Escalate, to evaluate an agent's intent based on confidence scores and blast radius. Attendees will leave with a concrete architectural framework and working code to implement structural schema validation, token-bucket rate limiting, and automated fallback gates that keep systems predictable under any model behavior.

• Sangeetha Parsan - Head of Product Data and MarTech at Informa

  Sangeetha Parsan is a visionary leader in data and technology solutions for global media companies. She excels in managing technology projects from start to finish, bridging high-level planning with on-the-ground execution. Sangeetha's strength lies in turning big ideas into practical, scalable solutions that support long-term business goals. Her hands-on approach and deep knowledge of AI and data platforms ensure critical projects succeed. She has a proven track record in handling technology mergers, developing data applications, and building robust data systems. Sangeetha leads digital transformations with empathy and strategic vision, skillfully managing large, diverse teams across multiple time zones. Beyond her professional work, Sangeetha is committed to empowering women in technology. As founder of the Women in Big Data online chapter, she actively mentors and gives back to the community, showcasing her dedication to fostering diversity in the tech industry.

• Agustina Bigatti - Founding Commercial Lead at Mentiora

  Nearly every health company has shipped an AI agent, and almost all of them built the same thing: a reactive bot that waits for a patient to show up with a problem, answers the question, and closes the chat. It saves a little cost and moves none of the metrics these companies say they care about: retention, engagement, and real outcomes. That gap is the opportunity. The next wave of health AI is proactive, it re-engages patients before they drop off, remembers every prior interaction, and is pointed at clinical goals, not ticket deflection. But healthcare raises the bar: outreach only counts if it makes the patient healthier. I'll map where the durable opportunities are across the patient journey, what makes them defensible, and the trap most builders fall into.

• Mumtaz Kynaston-Pearson - Principal Legal Counsel at Mimecast

  I am a UK-qualified Solicitor and IAPP CIPP/E and AIGP-certified technology lawyer specialising in AI governance, intellectual property strategy and data privacy. I serve as Principal Legal Counsel at Mimecast, a global SaaS cybersecurity company, where I advise product and engineering teams on AI deployment, regulatory compliance and IP portfolio strategy across multiple jurisdictions. I am based in Dubai. I speak regularly on AI governance, digital identity and the intersection of technology and law, with recent engagements including the Legal 500 GC Summit Middle East, Women in Tech Dubai and Crafty Fest London.

• Jyostna Seelam - Senior Manager and Engineering Lead, Software Engineering at Capital One

  Jyostna Seelam is a Senior Engineering Leader and Architect with over 17 years of experience specializing in platform engineering, DevOps, enterprise cloud architecture, and automated governance. She leads high-impact engineering teams in designing resilient, large-scale platforms that optimize developer velocity and operational efficiency in complex corporate environments. Beyond her enterprise leadership, Jyostna is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Fellow of the Soft Computing Research Society (SCRS), and the Founder and Chair of the Richmond ACM Professional Chapter. A passionate technical writer and community mentor, she regularly contributes to major industry platforms and serves as an expert judge for global technology awards, focusing on bridging the gap between robust engineering excellence and cutting-edge AI implementation.

• Mrunal Gangrade - Vice President of Engineering at JPMorgan Chase

  As organizations rush to adopt AI, security teams face a new challenge: protecting systems that are fundamentally different from traditional software. This session examines the intersection of cybersecurity and machine learning, covering how AI models introduce new attack surfaces, from data poisoning to adversarial inputs, and how the same machine learning techniques can be turned into powerful defensive tools. Drawing on experience securing systems in regulated financial environments, the talk walks through practical strategies for threat detection, risk scoring, and building AI systems that are resilient by design. Attendees will leave with a clearer framework for treating AI security as a core engineering discipline, not an afterthought.

• Jyoti Vasudev - Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft Corporation

  I design enterprise AI systems that help organizations make faster, better decisions under uncertainty. At Microsoft, I’ve helped build AI platforms recognized with the Adam Smith Award — one of the top global honors in corporate treasury and finance innovation. My interests are centered around enterprise AI, autonomous systems, decision intelligence, and the future of human-AI collaboration at scale.

• Gigi Kenneth - Founder at Asele

  Gigi Kenneth is an AI specialist, marketer, and founder working across AI, software, and women’s health. She is the founder of Asele, a cycle-tracking and wellness platform built for African women, where she leads product direction and works with her team to build AI-powered features for symptom-aware guidance, health-pattern tracking, and appointment preparation. Her background spans data science, machine learning, technical communication, life sciences, and product strategy. She has worked closely with engineers, data scientists, and delivery teams to turn technical systems into products, content, and tools that people can understand and use. Gigi is also the host of the Blush and Bloom Podcast, where she explores women’s health, work, and lived experience.

• Charu Maheshwari - Product Finance & Strategy at Anthropic

  AI pricing doesn't behave like SaaS pricing because the underlying economics are different: marginal cost came back. This talk gives builders and buyers a mental model for reading an AI price sheet and understanding what it's actually telling you. We'll cover why per-token pricing exists, what drives the spread between model tiers, how capability and cost trade off, and how to reason about unit economics when your product depends on a model API. The content is drawn from the work of pricing frontier models at Anthropic, but the economics apply across the industry and nothing in the talk is company-specific.

• Amber Ansari - AI Governance Lead at Cargill

  I have over 15 years of experience in the analytics industry. The last 10 years focused on advanced analytics and AI. My bachelor's is in civil engineering. First master's in business administration. Second master's in business analytics and data science. Currently I am AI Governance lead at Cargill shaping up responsible AI for a fortune-scale company. I also weekend executive online programs on AI, ML, Agentic AI in partnership with UT Austin. I am a TEDx and keynote speaker on AI topics and evolving role of humans in workspace as AI continues to reshape our world.

• Shuchi Agarwal - CTO/Founder at Snugd.ai

  This is the story of building Snugd — an AI-powered apartment hunting platform — from personal frustration to live product in six months. It starts with a UPitt grad, a PNC rotation program, and a terrible Google Sheet. It ends with a production app using Claude for 6 distinct AI features, Whisper for voice transcription, Next.js 16 on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and a data pipeline scraping 15 cities every 12-48 hours. In between: the prompt engineering that makes Claude return reliable match scores instead of hallucinated enthusiasm, the Whisper integration that turns rambling tour commentary into structured pros and cons, the true cost calculator that exposed how much listings hide, and the multi-channel contact system that works when landlords don't have email. I'll share what worked, what broke, and what I'd do differently if I built it again.

• Niharika Pramod Pujari - Lead Software Engineer at McGraw Hill

  I am a Lead Software Engineer with 9+ years of experience building and scaling frontend applications, with a focus on accessibility, frontend architecture, cloud systems, and AI-assisted software development. My recent work explores how teams can use generative AI effectively while maintaining reliability, accessibility, security, and engineering quality. I have published and spoken on these topics across industry and research venues, and I’m especially interested in practical approaches that help engineering teams move faster without sacrificing production readiness.

• Vidya Bansal - Principal CXO Architect at Adobe

  Putting AI into customer decisioning sounds easy—until you ask: What context does AI need to make useful and trustworthy decisions? Customer data platforms contain rich behavioral data, but raw customer signals alone aren't decision-ready. They need to be interpreted against a business goal, behavioral evidence, customer and cohort context, and the policies that govern what actions are appropriate. In this session, we'll walk through a reference architecture for AI-powered decision intelligence on top of a customer data platform. Using a marketing retention scenario, we'll show how behavioral signals can be transformed into business context, how AI agents can explore customer data to discover meaningful cohorts and opportunities, and how that evidence can be assembled into decision context for recommendations such as lifecycle interventions and next-best actions. We'll explore how agentic discovery, deterministic policies, confidence controls, and human oversight work together—showing where AI should reason freely and where governed systems must remain in control.

• Rishab Jolly - Senior Product Manager Azure at Microsoft

  Most teams ship AI agents to production with the same observability they'd give a static API, which is to say almost none. Then the agent silently loops, burns its token budget, or returns a confident, well-formatted, completely wrong answer while every dashboard stays green. Traditional APM assumes deterministic code: same input, same output, errors that throw. Agents break all three. This talk covers how to instrument agents for the failures that matter, not "did it run?" but "what did it decide, why, what did it cost, and was the answer any good?" I'll cover the signals worth alerting on, tracing a multi-step run as a decision graph, and where the open OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions give you a vendor-neutral foundation today, plus where they stop, so you know what you still have to build. Candid about what bit teams in practice and what changed after.

• Su Belagodu - Managing Partner at Intellectus Advisors

  Su Belagodu is a founder, AI adoption strategist, speaker, and former product executive with nearly two decades of experience building and scaling technology products across startups and enterprise organizations. As the Founder and Managing Partner of Intellectus Advisors, she helps organizations move from AI experimentation to trusted, enterprise-scale adoption by designing Human + AI operating models that people confidently embrace. She is the creator of the Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) Maturity Model and Humyn Pulse, a platform that helps organizations measure and strengthen human oversight in AI systems. Her work sits at the intersection of AI adoption, trust, governance, and product strategy, with a focus on helping leaders turn AI investments into meaningful business outcomes. A member of the Forbes Technology Council, Su writes and speaks on AI adoption, human oversight, and the future of Human + AI collaboration. She is passionate about making AI more accessible and believes the next generation of innovation will be shaped by leaders who combine technical curiosity with empathy, sound judgment, and diverse perspectives. Through her speaking, mentoring, and advisory work, Su is committed to opening doors for more women in AI and technology. She encourages women to see themselves not only as users of AI, but as founders, builders, decision-makers, and leaders who have an essential role in shaping the future.

• Jacqui Uys - Global Marketing Director at Morae

  Jacqui Uys is a Cape Town-based growth and marketing leader with more than 20 years of experience driving revenue and market expansion across EMEA, Africa, and North America. She is currently Global Senior Director of Marketing at Morae, the unified legal intelligence partner that combines advanced AI, legal technology, and 1,000+ legal experts and engineers to move corporate legal departments and law firms from fragmented tools to connected intelligence. There, she is building a world-class, revenue-driven marketing function spanning 20+ languages across five continents. Before Morae, Jacqui was Chief Growth Officer at Hellopeter, where she led the platform's revenue growth, and Director of Digital Marketing at Clickatell, where she built the growth engine behind a $91M Series C. Her career spans SaaS, EdTech, FMCG consulting, and agency life at Ogilvy. Along the way she has founded, scaled, and exited businesses, and established Unilever's first African in-house agency, a model so effective it was later rolled out across 40+ countries. Her work in e-commerce marketing innovation earned her a Yotpo Rising Star nomination in New York. A passionate advocate for leadership done right, Jacqui has built and led high-performing teams across multiple continents and time zones, and believes the best results come from the right people, a strong culture, and clarity of purpose. Today her focus is on how AI is reshaping both marketing and the legal industry, and what it takes to lead growth in an AI-driven world.

• Maria Cristina Cardenas - Government Affairs Director at Coursera

  María Cristina Cárdenas Peralta is Government Affairs Manager at Coursera, where she leads strategic partnerships with governments, multilateral organizations, academic institutions, and private-sector stakeholders to advance workforce development, digital transformation, and AI readiness initiatives. She specializes in designing and scaling large-scale skills development programs that equip learners, workers, entrepreneurs, and public servants with the capabilities needed to thrive in a rapidly changing economy. Throughout her career, she has successfully brought together diverse stakeholders—including ministries, development banks, international organizations, industry associations, and technology companies—to develop innovative solutions that deliver measurable impact and expand access to opportunity. Prior to joining Coursera, Cristina founded 3C Innovation, a consulting firm focused on leveraging technology to strengthen education systems, workforce development, and digital skills across emerging markets. In the public sector, she served as National Director of AprendeMX at Mexico’s Ministry of Education, where she led the country’s digital inclusion strategy aimed at developing digital skills among teachers and students nationwide. Previously, as part of Mexico’s National Digital Strategy within the Office of the President, she led education-focused initiatives that promoted the use of technology to improve learning outcomes and modernize educational services across government institutions. At the international level, Cristina has collaborated with organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. Her work has focused on fostering public-private partnerships, expanding access to education and workforce opportunities, and supporting economic development through innovation and technology. Cristina holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Essex, United Kingdom. She is a founding board member of CONECTADAS and actively supports social impact initiatives, including Christel House International and Casa de María, organizations dedicated to expanding opportunities for underserved children and youth.

• Sonia Kataria - Head of Software at Signify myCreation

  I am a technology leader with over 18 years of experience spanning software engineering, product innovation, and digital transformation. Throughout my career, I have led global teams, built technology products, and helped organizations navigate complex change in an increasingly digital world. My passion lies in helping businesses unlock the value of emerging technologies. As AI continues to reshape industries, I am especially interested in how organizations can move beyond the hype to drive meaningful transformation, foster innovation, and prepare their people and processes for the future. Having worked at the intersection of technology, strategy, and leadership, I bring a practical perspective on what it takes to turn ambitious ideas into real-world outcomes. I am passionate about making complex technology concepts accessible and helping others navigate the opportunities and challenges.

• Stephanie Gendron - CEO at Ascala Tech

  Stéphanie Gendron is the Founder & CEO of Ascala Tech, where she helps organizations implement, build, and train around high-impact sales and marketing growth systems using automation, AI, and connected digital platforms. With an engineering background, former PMP certification, nearly 30 years of experience, and 15 years working across five countries and three continents, Stéphanie brings a unique perspective that combines Fortune 500 project and digital transformation experience with entrepreneurial and startup ventures. Having led complex technology, infrastructure, digital transformation, and business initiatives throughout her career, she now applies the same structured, execution-focused approach to sales, marketing, automation, and AI adoption. Today, she leads Ascala in developing AI-powered applications, implementing AI-enabled business systems, and helping organizations identify the highest-value opportunities for AI—focusing on measurable business outcomes rather than technology for technology's sake.

• Sarah Liu - Founder and CTO at BasilMinTyme Limited

  Sarah Liu is the Founder and CTO of BasilMinTyme, where she is building ThymeLine, a WhatsApp-first customer engagement and CRM-linked conversation platform for businesses that rely heavily on customer conversations. She has over 30 years’ experience in IT and software development, with a strong background in integrations, messaging platforms, customer data, and business workflow automation. As a solo technical founder, Sarah uses AI-augmented development to move from idea to working product quickly while keeping human engineering judgement, product thinking, and real customer needs at the centre. Her current work explores how small teams and solo builders can use AI practically to build, ship, test, and improve real digital products — beyond demos and hype.

• Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri - Senior Director, Applied Research, AI at Thomson Reuters

  Business processes, IT contracts, SLAs and protocols are all getting rewired in this age of AI driven transformation. But in this journey there are ample opportunities to go down an alley that is horror filled with insufficient guard rails, incomplete harnesses and context leak to cause mayhem and instability that the existing IT world is not familiar with. I would like to share about one such real failure of Agentic workflow transformation gone wrong, and how it culminated into best practices, templates and sdlc that builds the right kind of Agentic workflows.

• Silvana Pimentel - Chief AI Officer at AI Your Superpower

  Silvana Pimentel is a Chief AI Officer, AI Consultant, TEDx Speaker, best-selling author, podcast host, and founder of AI Your Superpower. Known as The AI Superpower Implementor, she helps entrepreneurs and small businesses use AI to increase visibility, generate leads, improve productivity, and grow revenue without losing their human voice.

• Rashmi Sinha - Vice President of AI and Enterprise Architecture at Horizon BCBS

  Healthcare IT leader with more than 25 yr experience. I led several transformations including digital. In my current role I own the AI solution for the enterprise. I have delivered successful solutions and continuing to deliver based on a roadmap.

• Rashi Raj - Senior Manager, Software Developement at Oracle

  Rashi Raj is a Senior Engineering Manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and a technology leader with 17 years of experience building large-scale cloud, data, and intelligent decisioning systems. She leads globally distributed engineering teams responsible for platforms that help enterprises interpret complex cloud environments and translate massive operational signals into recommendations, insights, and business decisions. Her work at OCI has contributed to multimillion-dollar business impact and improved how enterprise customers optimize, govern, and operate cloud infrastructure at scale. Rashi’s leadership spans the space where AI becomes practical: data quality, scalable architecture, reliability, governance, recommendation systems, and the engineering discipline required to move intelligent systems from idea to production. A University of Washington graduate, Rashi is also a conference speaker, mentor, and technical reviewer for books, journals, and international AI and engineering conferences. She brings to AI Builders a leader’s perspective on building intelligent systems that are not only innovative, but trusted, scalable, and impactful in real enterprise environments.

• Rachell Dumas - Founder & CEO at HEARD

  Every year, millions of patients experience healthcare dismissal, communication breakdowns, delayed diagnoses, and preventable harm. HEARD (Human-Enabled AI Reporting & Documentation) is an AI-powered patient advocacy platform designed to help patients document symptoms, prepare for appointments, navigate healthcare systems, and escalate care concerns when necessary. Built after founder Rachell Dumas experienced nine pregnancy losses and later survived a delayed neurological diagnosis that resulted in two brain surgeries, HEARD transforms patient experiences into actionable insights that improve communication, engagement, and safety. This live startup showcase will demonstrate how HEARD leverages AI to empower patients, support caregivers, and create a future where critical concerns are identified and addressed before harm occurs. Attendees will see the platform in action, learn about its market opportunity, and explore how AI can bridge one of healthcare's most persistent gaps: ensuring patients are heard.

• Angy Shavit-Dominguez - Director, Information Security at DoubleVerify

  Enterprise sales still die in spreadsheets and Word docs. Security questionnaires, DPAs, and AI addendum questions can take days per deal, and every “Yes, we use AI” answer triggers legal review. I’m a GRC lead at a global ad-tech company. I didn’t wait for a perfect internal tool. I built an RFI agent in Cursor: project rules that encode our workflow, a knowledge-base CSV of approved answers, Python automation that fills .docx templates and marks new text for human review, and a GitLab mirror so the team can reuse it on VPN. In this session I’ll walk through the architecture (what the agent does vs. what humans must approve), a live-style walkthrough on a real questionnaire pattern, and the guardrails that keep us from hallucinating into customer contracts. You’ll leave with a checklist to replicate this in any function that answers the same questions repeatedly through security, privacy, procurement, or customer success.