Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI · Mode co-founder

Benn Stancil

Last year, Benn's talk was one of the crowd favorites. This year he's back, now as a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI.

The title is still under wraps. If you were in the room last year, you already know why you'll want to be in this one. Missed it? Watch "In the Long Run, Everything is a Fad".

Co-author, O'Reilly's Fundamentals of Data Engineering

Joe Reis

Machinery, Meaning, and Agency: Data Engineering for AI

Joe co-wrote the book on data engineering. Now he's arguing the bottleneck has moved. Pipelines, orchestration and compute aren't what's holding AI back. Meaning is. In his words: "When machines take actions, semantic ambiguity becomes catastrophic."

His answer is a renaissance in data modeling. He argues neither rigid dogma nor unstructured chaos works for systems that act on your data, and lays out an approach he calls "Mixed Model Arts" for modeling context, semantics and relationships so machines can act on them responsibly.

Also on Nov 5: Julia Silge on the SQL agent harness Posit didn't mean to build, plus Stripe, DoorDash, Perplexity, Mercury and more.

Two weeks out · Come a day early

Nov 4 is two-hour, hands-on workshops: build a data agent with Vercel, turn agent traces into better agents with Braintrust, get unstructured documents agent-ready with Reducto, and more. Seats go in the order people register.