Our Speakers

Coming soon..

Gabriel Velazquez Lopez

The One Certification That Works on Every Cloud

L100 (Beginner)

Gabriel Velazquez Lopez

Bio

Gabriel Velazquez is the founder of Antfluent, a Canadian consultancy focused exclusively on Anthropic's Claude. He spent nearly two decades in cloud technology, and was Anthropic's first Applied AI Solutions Architect at AWS, where he led the business relationship that helped scale Anthropic into one of the platform's largest AI partners. After working with organizations around the world, he left to bring that expertise home to Canada.

Talk summary

Every cloud certification you can earn today locks you into a single provider. AWS certs make you an AWS practitioner. Azure certs make you a Microsoft practitioner. But the technology reshaping every cloud platform, AI, now has a certification that travels with you everywhere. In this talk, Gabriel Velazquez shares why he left a global role at AWS to bet his career on Anthropic's Claude ecosystem, why Claude being the only frontier AI model available across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud changes the certification calculus for cloud practitioners, and what he learned earning the Claude Certified Architect credential. Whether you're choosing your first certification or your next one, this session offers a framework for thinking about where to invest when the industry is moving faster than any single vendor's roadmap.

Jason Mayes

Vibing with Antigravity for custom Web AI solutions

L200 (Intermediate)

Jason Mayes

Bio

Web AI Lead, Google (15 years) Jason is Google's Web AI lead, representing teams such as LiteRT.js, DeepMind (Gemma web models), Chrome, TensorFlow.js, and MediaPipe, helping developers globally apply machine learning in JavaScript to the industries that they work within. Jason is the author of the first Web AI courses on Google Developers and EdX, that have enabled over 100,000 developers start their journey with Machine Learning in the browser and is also the creator of the world's first Web AI Summit bringing together top minds in the field. Jason combines his knowledge of the technical and creative worlds to develop innovative prototypes for Google's largest customers and internal teams with 20+ years experience working at the intersection of web engineering and emerging technologies. He holds an MEng in Computer Science, is a member of the British Computing Society, and is a certified information privacy technologist. Jason loves sharing knowledge online which has attracted a global following.

Talk summary

Google's Gemini 3 offers a significant leap forward in its ability to create technically complex solutions when used in conjunction with traditional web engineering workflows. Join Jason Mayes, Web AI Lead at Google, as he shows you how you can maximize your potential using Antigravity with Gemini 3 when combined with your existing knowledge as a seasoned engineer to get the best of both worlds. Save time and turn 10x engineers into 100x. Jason will cover how he's able to create fully functional Web AI examples powered by LiteRT.js, to produce technically complex and functional demos powered by client side AI with minimal effort, while maintaining control, allowing him to focus on the problem he actually wants to solve without needing prior experience with a new library you may not have learnt yet.

Morgan Foster

The Illustrated Primer to GenAI Networking

L200 (Intermediate)

Morgan Foster

Bio

Morgan Foster is a Senior Principal Software Engineer in Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group, where she works on making AI agents first-class citizens on Kubernetes. She co-chairs the Kubernetes AI Gateway Working Group under the CNCF and is a core contributor to the Kagenti project. Before Red Hat, Morgan spent a decade in site reliability engineering at Google, Twitter, and Box, and cut her teeth on SpiderMonkey at Mozilla. She lives not far south in Bellingham, WA with her husband and daughter.

Talk summary

AI Gateways are popping up like weeds in the world of distributed computing, but what are they? Why do they exist? Didn't we already have API Gateways? From GuardRails to Semantic Caching, in this talk I'll use my work co-chairing a working group tasked with designing an "AI Gateway" specification for the Kubernetes ecosystem as a way of demonstrating why this new type of network application is necessary, why they're hard to build, and how you might put them to use in your own clusters.

Adina Gray

Who Adopts AI First and Who Struggles to Keep Up

L100 (Beginner)

Adina Gray

Bio

Adina Gray is the founder of PurpleOwl AI and an international speaker on artificial intelligence, education, and the future of work. Drawing on 20 years of experience in higher education and leadership, she helps organizations build AI literacy and respond strategically to the opportunities and challenges of AI adoption. She has led institutional AI initiatives, organized major AI events, and delivered speaking and training engagements across Canada and internationally. Adina is also the founder of the AI in Education Network of British Columbia, a province wide initiative advancing practical and responsible AI use.

Talk summary

AI is spreading quickly, but adoption is uneven across industries, organizations, and groups. This session looks at why some people and institutions are able to integrate AI into their work while others struggle to keep up, and what this may mean for the future workforce.

Egina Malaj

Simplifying the design and deployment of Agentic AI systems at scale

L200 (Intermediate)

Egina Malaj

Bio

Based in Vancouver, Egina is an AI Architect and a Microsoft AI MVP. She holds a PhD at the intersection of engineering and statistics and brings a strong foundation in machine learning and AI system design. She focuses on building scalable, production-ready AI solutions, including agentic architectures, and works closely with organizations to turn complex problems into practical AI applications. Egina is also actively involved in the AI community across Vancouver, contributing through events, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.

Talk summary

As AI systems evolve from single-model applications to agentic architectures, managing orchestration, state, and workflows becomes increasingly complex. Cloud-based agentic frameworks such as Azure’s Agent Framework for multi-agent handoff orchestration and agentic retrieval capabilities for search systems extend traditional RAG with dynamic, context-aware retrieval and structured coordination between components. This talk will walk you through how these frameworks simplify building and deploying agentic systems in the cloud. It will show how built-in orchestration, tool execution, and state management reduce custom infrastructure, making solutions easier to scale, maintain, and move to production.

Niko Smeds

The Cloud Bill Nobody Could Explain

L200 (Intermediate)

Niko Smeds

Bio

Niko is a staff software engineer at Grafana Labs, where he helps build and monitor the Kubernetes and cloud platforms. From OpenStack to K8s, he has experience with both private and public cloud infrastructure.

Talk summary

At Grafana Labs, our finance team noticed cloud costs steadily increasing in ways our cost metrics couldn't explain. We declared an incident and started digging. Billing consoles told us NAT gateways and audit logs were expensive, but not why. This talk walks through how we made the invisible visible across AWS and GCP, systematically identifying traffic patterns we didn't need to be paying for. By the end, we'd significantly improved our cloud margin and could finally explain where the money was going.