AI Con USA 2026 - AI & ML Productivity Tools

Sunday, June 7

Jeff Pierce
Coveros

AI for Leaders

Sunday, June 7, 2026 - 8:30am to Monday, June 8, 2026 - 5:00pm
Jonathan Kauffman
Coveros, Inc.

AI for Testers

Sunday, June 7, 2026 - 8:30am to Monday, June 8, 2026 - 5:00pm

This hands-on course helps testers understand how to leverage AI to improve software test planning, execution, automation, and reporting.

Jeff Payne
Coveros

Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)

Sunday, June 7, 2026 - 8:30am to Monday, June 8, 2026 - 5:00pm

Monday, June 8

Dona Sarkar
Microsoft
MB

Human in the Loop

New
Monday, June 8, 2026 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

"We love AI and use it for everything we do!" "We hate AI and will NEVER use it for anything ever, I swear to god!" Which camp are you in? This will be a question that will come up over and over in 2026 and beyond. If you use AI for EVERYTHING and think you can be mistaken for AI…has AI not already taken your job? We all need to get INTENTIONAL about our stance in the AI-verse. Have you thought deeply about what is a good activity for AI to lead on and what should be uniquely human? We are already seeing a premium price tag on in-person, uniquely human-to-human experiences, and this will...

Laurel Orr
Stacklok
MD

Model Context Protocol Fundamentals

New
Monday, June 8, 2026 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Tired of staring at the chat box of an AI assistant wishing it could actually do a task for you rather than just telling you what to do? Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the glue between an AI agent and your data and tools. With MCP, AI assistants can read your documents, conversations, and other context and take action for you by sending emails, submitting tickets and more. But what really is MCP and how do you use MCP servers safely in practice as part of your day-to-day workflow? This half-day course introduces MCP and dives into practical use cases. Laurel will walk you through how to...

Guy Royse
Redis
MG

Build Your Own AI News Agent with Redis + LangGraph.js.

New
Monday, June 8, 2026 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Tired of sifting through endless news sources and missing the topics you care about? This hands-on workshop empowers you to build a personalized AI news assistant using Redis and LangGraph.js. You’ll learn to ingest articles from RSS feeds, summarize and analyze them, extract structured data, and generate embeddings—all stored in Redis for powerful hybrid (vector + structured) search. Your agent will provide a web interface for browsing and semantic search, and even chat with you about current events, retrieving relevant articles and metadata using RAG techniques. LangGraph.js orchestrates...

Tuesday, June 9

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TB

AI-Assisted Development: Supercharge Your Coding with GitHub Copilot and More

Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

The world of software development is rapidly evolving, and AI-powered tools are leading the charge. Generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Continue are revolutionizing how we code by offering intelligent code suggestions, complete function generation, and other advanced features that streamline the development process, improve code quality, and significantly boost developer productivity. In this hands-on workshop, Jeffery Payne will guide you through leveraging these powerful tools to accelerate your coding, reduce errors, and unlock new levels of creativity. Learn how to...

Ryan Lee
Trident Advisors
TC

AI-Enabled Building: Let the Robot Do the Work

New
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Theory is great, but what about getting your hands dirty with some real problem-solving? Lets build your own AI Operating System that you'll take home and use immediately. Join Melissa Benua and Ryan Lee for a hands-on session where you'll construct a personalized AI toolkit that solves YOUR specific testing problems, regardless of your coding background. We'll start by deconstructing the modern software development lifecycle used by all tech companies to safely ship software solutions to their customers, and show you exactly where AI accelerates each phase. Then we'll prove a critical...

Dona Sarkar
Microsoft
Jeremiah Marble
3rd Rodeo AI
TD

This Is Our Agent, We Make the Call

Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Agents! Finally, a term that might be even more over-hyped than AI! But what exactly are Agents, and more importantly, how do you use them? Where do Agents fit within the overall AI toolkit? What capabilities do they add, and what tasks can they help us perform? Dona and Jeremiah will help you gain a solid understanding of Agents and the fundamental components of an Agent-based AI system. You’ll learn key design principles for Agents, as well as when to leverage them and scenarios where they may not be the best choice. We'll cover how to identify business problems that are well-suited for...

Tariq King
Test IO, an EPAM Company
TG

Agentic AI: From Rules to Reasoning

New
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

AI agents have existed for decades, but generative AI has fundamentally changed what agents can do and how they are designed and built. Come and explore the evolution of AI agents across two major waves. First, learn the foundations of Agentic AI through agents built using rules, heuristics, and traditional machine learning, examining where these approaches excel and why they struggle with complexity, ambiguity, and scale. Then dive into the second wave of agents powered by generative AI and multimodal large language models. These modern agents can reason, plan, use tools, and interact...

Jason_Arbon
Testers.AI
TH

Vibe-Coding a Business: Using AI to Rapidly Build, Test, and Validate Real Products

New
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

AI has fundamentally changed how quickly new businesses can be created. With modern, high-end models, individuals and teams can now move from a raw idea to a functioning product, market narrative, sales motion, and operating loop in days rather than months. The challenge is no longer whether AI can generate assets—it’s how to use AI intentionally across the entire business lifecycle to produce outcomes that are relevant, credible, and sustainable. In this hands-on tutorial, Jason Arbon leads participants through a practical, end-to-end approach to “vibe-coding” a business using AI. The...

Wednesday, June 10

Dona Sarkar
Microsoft
K1

Will the Real Autonomous Agent Please Stand Up: What’s Real, What’s Not, and What You Actually SHOULD Be Investing in in the AI-Verse

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 8:30am to 9:30am

If you’ve seen the news lately, the tech bros will have you believe that AI is both here to take your job and also your soul. On the other side, people are saying that we are in an AI-bubble, it’s all hype, and we don’t need to worry about it at all. Which is it? The truth is…it’s a little of BOTH. Dona will demystify what the latest buzzwords in AI (what is OpenClaw all about) and show you a roadmap for how you can AND SHOULD be using AI in your day-to-day life. You’ll learn how to set up an experiment framework for yourself, identify the workflows AI is actually good for, how to run the...

Sowjanya Pandruju
Amazon Web Services
W2

Containers That Think: Building AI-Powered Self-Healing Applications That Never Go Down

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 11:00am to 11:45am

Enterprise containerized applications face a critical reliability crisis with complex failure modes including memory leaks, cascading failures, network partitions, and resource contention that traditional monitoring tools cannot predict or resolve fast enough. Organizations typically experience multiple production incidents monthly with multi-hour resolution times that consume significant engineering resources while causing customer-facing outages and revenue loss. Traditional approaches rely on reactive monitoring, manual troubleshooting across distributed container environments, and time...

Monalisha Singh
NetApp, Inc.
W4

Tracing the Mind of the Machine: Observability for AI Agents

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 11:50am to 12:35pm

AI agents have evolved beyond LLM chatbots; they possess the ability to plan, reason, and act autonomously. However, as their autonomy increases, understanding how they make decisions becomes more challenging. Traditional methods of observability—such as metrics, logs, and traces—capture outcomes but do not reveal the underlying reasoning. This session will explore how AI Agent Observability can shed light on the decision-making process by collecting and analyzing agent traces. We will discuss emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides structured and shareable...

Ryan Lee
Trident Advisors
W11

Unlock Exponential Productivity: The AI Maturity Model for Product Engineering

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 2:25pm to 3:10pm

Are you ready to transform your productivity from incremental gains to exponential growth? Whether you're an individual contributor or engineering leader, this session introduces the AI Maturity Model, a proven framework that guides technical teams through five distinct levels of AI adoption—from 33% productivity boosts to an extraordinary 1000% increase. Discover how to navigate each stage: Level 1 (Foundation, 33%) builds essential AI awareness; Level 2 (Literacy, 75%) develops practical AI skills; Level 3 (Fluency, 300%) masters AI-assisted workflows; Level 4 (Agents, 500%) implements...

David Colwell
Tricentis
K3

Why Your Agentic PR Never Gets Approved—Going from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 3:50pm to 4:35pm

You can write 100% of your code with AI, and only be 15% more productive. Want to know why? Solving the problem of moving faster as an engineer is about way more than code. You design, you problem solve, you discuss and communicate, you test, you shepherd the PR through review, you deploy, and you observe. So why are you being told you should be 10x faster now that AI can write code? David will discuss practical solutions for safely accelerating your entire workflow with AI. He will look at how to collaborate with PM, how to use AI planning, how to ensure validations are solid and builds...

Ken Johnston
Envorso
Bob Rapp
GM (General Motors)
Ravi Vedula
Microsoft
K4

Show Me the ROI: What Enterprise AI Actually Delivers in Year 4 - Panel

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 4:40pm to 5:40pm

The hype cycle is over. The pilot graveyard is full. MIT research suggests that 95% of Generative AI implementations have little to no measurable impact on P&L. So what separates the 5% that actually deliver? In this no-fluff panel, practitioners from the front lines of enterprise AI — spanning automotive, cloud platforms, and the messy middle of real-world deployment — will have a candid conversation about what's working, what consistently stalls, and what it actually takes to move from experimentation to results.

The panel will discuss:

The use cases that outperform the hype...

Thursday, June 11

Kat Styons
Yahoo
K5

Building Agentic Engineering Teams

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Agentic engineering has quietly inverted the fundamental bottleneck of software development. For decades, the hard part was building, so we optimized teams for execution speed, hired specialists to cover capability gaps, and treated wasted work as a cost to be managed through careful planning and consensus. Now an engineer with the right tools can scaffold major features in hours, often faster than they can get a meeting on the calendar to discuss it. This talk is a field guide for leading teams through that inversion. It reexamines the hiring calculus, what makes an early career engineer...

Jessie Thomas
Allen Institute
K6

The Next Era of Biological Discovery

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 9:35am to 10:20am

We are entering a defining chapter for bioscience—one where AI is no longer an accessory, but a core engine of discovery. At the Allen Institute, AI is being woven throughout the scientific process empowering research teams to analyze complex biological systems at scale. Their teams are collaborating to develop frontier AI applications like advanced computer vision to interpret high-resolution imaging data, multimodal models that integrate complex molecular, cellular, and physiological signals, as well as intelligent systems to assist researchers as they navigate and synthesize vast...

Joe Byrne
LaunchDarkly
T3

Speed Without Fear: Controlling AI-Driven Releases

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 10:50am to 11:35am

Learn how to move faster and safer with your AI projects. Whether you are using AI to help create applications with Github Co-pilot, Cursor, one of the other expanding code generation AI tools, or you are developing agents and utilizing various LLMs to support them, using feature flags can provide the ability to test multiple variations in production while providing a safety net that allows you to quickly resolve issues in production. AI is moving fast and the number of options available to you is increasing daily. Join the session to learn how you can validate and experiment with various...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
S5

AI-Assisted Development: Using GitHub Copilot and Other Tools to Accelerate Delivery

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 10:50am to 11:35am

There is no question that Generative AI models can improve the productivity of almost every role within the software development process. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Tabnine, and more, can be critical tools to help developers do their jobs better and faster. Join Coveros CEO Jeffery Payne to explore how Generative AI solutions help software developers generate and supplement code and even suggest improvements to what you’ve already created.

Joshua Powers
Dev Technology
T5

Context Engineering for Agentic Workflows

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 11:40am to 12:25pm

The success of agentic applications using LLMs depends largely on the ability to properly manage the context - the collection of prompts, tools, history, memory, and RAG-indexed content. When you take all of these elements into account, you are able to get the most out of the LLM while avoiding hallucination, conversational drift, and relevance issues. Topics to be covered include: dynamic LLM selection, automated prompt development, context compression, tool decoration, RAG optimization, and LLM-as-a-judge quality assessment of LLM responses. Each of these smaller parts together build...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
T10

Beyond the Chatbot: Building and Orchestrating Autonomous Security Agents

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 2:40pm to 3:25pm

The next generation of security automation isn’t found in a chat interface—it’s found in Agents. While basic AI assistants can provide security advice and even remediate vulnerabilities, the real breakthrough for security teams lies in using an Agentic Workflow for security testing: the ability to build, customize, and orchestrate specialized agents that take ownership of the testing and remediation lifecycle. In this session, Jeffery Payne demonstrates how to move beyond conversational AI to create autonomous security agents using standardized formats compatible across tools like GitHub...

Aprajita Mathur
Guardant Health
T11

User-centricity for AI-assisted Test Engineers

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 2:40pm to 3:25pm

Traditional software testing is fundamentally deterministic: the same inputs must always produce the same outputs. Yet many teams introduce AI into their testing without first defining the problem the AI is meant to solve, leading to brute-force experimentation and unreliable results. Google’s 2025 DORA report highlights that user-centricity is a prerequisite for AI success and that AI is most effective when it is pointed at a clear problem. AP shows you how that insight applies technically to testing. Before AI can be used as a testing tool, it must first be tested and understood in the...

Anusha Dwivedula
Morningstar
T12

Evals Are a Team Sport: Building Scalable Evaluation Pipelines for Trustworthy AI

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 2:40pm to 3:25pm

Modern AI systems fail not only because of flawed models but because evaluation is often treated as a one-time task rather than an ongoing discipline. This session addresses the challenge of scaling evaluation across teams and pipelines to ensure model reliability, fairness, and performance. Drawing from real-world experience in large-scale financial analytics, Anusha Dwivedula will examine how product and data teams can collaborate to design a continuous evaluation framework that integrates precision, recall, and drift metrics with observability, lineage, and quality controls. She will...

K7

Proven, Not Promised: Real-World Insights from Nelnet’s AI Transformation

Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 3:30pm to 4:15pm

Engineering leaders are under constant pressure to deliver faster, improve quality, and reduce costs despite fixed resources. At Nelnet, this challenge was compounded by ongoing acquisitions, a complex application landscape, and competing team priorities. Brittany Wilson will discuss how they evaluated the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on the software development lifecycle without disrupting critical delivery work and how Nelnet adopted a measured pilot approach. Over 12 weeks, a side-by-side experiment compared a GenAI-enabled team with a business-as-usual team working on similar...