AI to Production: A tactical discussion on making AI work for your team

Vinay Perneti is VP of Engineering at Augment Code, an AI coding assistant focused on solving problems for professional software teams.

Previously, he led Meta's Observability Platforms team and served as Engineering Director at Pure Storage, where he spent 8 years helping scale FlashBlade into a highly scalable, fault-tolerant storage system. At Pure Storage, he focused on fleet reliability, file protocols, and data protection while building frameworks to bring clarity to organizational goals.

His leadership philosophy, shaped by experience at companies like Meta, Pure Storage, and Riverbed Technology, centers on enabling teams to thrive by staying out of their way and creating environments where individuals can do their best work.

Workday uses a proprietary programming language and in-memory graph database with metadata defined in a 631MB, 131-million-line JSON catalog that's nearly impossible to parse manually.

• Anand built an AI-powered system that can automatically generate SQL queries from natural language questions about Workday's complex data model
• Transforms hours of manual ID lookup and SQL generation into minutes of natural conversation
• Can answer complex business questions like "How many people did we hire in 2024?" or "Should I be doing succession planning for any employees?"

Forrest had been conceptualizing a complex infrastructure provisioning system for years - one involving dynamic provisioning, resource state management, and handling statically defined YAML configurations. The scope was so large he never had time to tackle it. Using Augment over a single weekend, he built a working proof-of-concept with 10,000 lines of valuable Go code. This transformed an abstract idea he'd been carrying for years into a tangible, working system.

Josh is a Principal Field Engineer at Redis, focusing on helping customers get the most out of the product. He’s been in the industry in various roles since the mid 90s, focusing mainly on backend development with several forays into other areas such as developer experience and documentation engineering.