Advances in cloud infrastructure and the broad adoption of hybrid/remote work models have given organizations new options for driving productivity and operational efficiency. Now that so many devices are connected to our networks outside of the data center, we’re seeing a significant rise in security attacks around the world. Join us for a fireside chat with Anand Oswal, SVP, Network Security for Palo Alto Networks, to discuss how the cybersecurity industry is innovating with AI to respond to the changing threat landscape. One of the most exciting developments is adoption of Deep Learning techniques to stop attacks before they happen.

There are so many different ways to grow in our industry, and one of the best potential shortcuts to turbocharge your growth is to join a hyper growth startup. You will be given responsibility beyond your title, you will wear many hats—you will experience a ton in a shorter, intense period of time. We’ll discuss ways to succeed at these startups: how to have a growth mindset, to keep an open-mind and optimize for learning above everything else. During your time at one of these companies, it's imperative to try and absorb the enthusiasm and knowledge that you will be able to glean from everyone around you, and to in-turn learn to foster and share your energy with others. We’ll also touch base on learnings beyond engineering: you will be in a position to influence cross functional partners—there are few other roles where you as a senior leader will have such a critical part to play in the running of the company.

In this session, Jonathon will discuss why Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of the most successful relationships, product teams, and organizations. He will provide a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product initiatives fail or underperform. Next, he will highlight how top-performance digital product companies build alignment to inform effective product strategy and empower product teams to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

In this session, Loom VP Product Anique Drumright will break down the nuanced correlation between product and eng teams — and why companies often find themselves on the back foot after underinvesting in front-line engineering managers. She’ll outline why this is such a prevalent pitfall, what the most common blind spots are, and best practices for avoiding it. She’ll also talk about the importance of supercharging your engineering leaders — including instilling the skill of advocacy — so they can play an equally dominant role alongside product managers. Based on hands-on experience building hypergrowth teams, Anique will share successes and tough lessons learned when it comes to hiring execution, quality, and retention at fast-growth PLG orgs.

Your team has increasingly good visibility into how users experience apps, from stability and performance metrics to product analytics. But, who decides when stability and performance is good enough and the team can focus on building new features? Join Bugsnag’s VP of Product, Duncan Hewett, for a discussion on how Product and Engineering teams can work together to balance competing priorities.

Starting with the announcement of OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 in April of this year, enthusiasts and research engineers alike have generated a tidal wave of interest in the latest quantum-leap ML advances for Generative AI—particularly for forms of human expression. DALL·E 2 pioneered a new AI technique known as Diffusion Models: learning from a huge range of photography and visual expression on the open web, then “denoising” an initial input of random noise, while using the power of Transformers to structure how the resulting image evolves based on an input prompt. Over the last 6 months, DALL·E 2 has attracted enthusiastic supporters (and a few critics, as with any new disruptive technology) in artistic, engineering, and research communities. That’s because these models power new forms of expression, including techniques that work “backwards” from images to understand the concepts the model “sees”. In this panel, we’ll compare and contrast the impact that Generative AI has had across a wide range of products and tasks, from the impact on the field of software engineering, to the workflows adopted in creative fields. We’ll also talk about the impact on curation and community on the web, and how the act of discovery and inspiration might change with workflows powered by Generative AI.

Whatnot Head of Growth Engineering and former Pinterest growth leader and entrepreneur Jeff Chang will discuss how to build an effective growth team from the earliest stages, how to structure that team, and how to ensure they drive maximum impact throughout the varying stages of growth to come.

According to Gartner, only 53% of machine learning proofs of concept (POC) are ever scaled to production. Even fewer manage to deliver the intended and measurable business value. On the bright side, Gartner projects that by 2024, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI, driving a 5x increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures. Machine learning ops (ML Ops) is a practice and methodology for preparing, deploying and managing machine learning models in production. Productizing ML Ops is hard, but in reality, it’s a requirement for AI scalability and success. In this Q&A session, Sapta Girisa, Senior Director at Lohika and Capgemini Engineering will discuss key considerations for ML Ops, why it’s essential to AI scalability and how to accelerate your AI engineering.