# Anthony Ivan — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/anthony-ivan/
Program status: The working timetable is public. Announced speakers and presentations are confirmed; some track assignments, session groupings and times may change as keynote, partner and specialist sessions are finalised. Morning keynote programmes and Industry sessions will be added as they are confirmed.

## Running AI Coding Agents at Scale: Adopting New Models, Controlling Cost, and Governing What Agents Do

- Track: Industry

Running coding agents across a company comes down to three questions: which models to offer, how to control cost, and what agents should be allowed to do. This talk gives four recommendations on those questions, drawn from running coding agents for 12,000 employees at Databricks.

Offer new models early, and let data choose the default: every model reaches everyone on release day, and within a week, test results, user feedback, and cost decide whether it becomes the default. Use separate limits for accidents and for planned work: a daily limit engineers can extend themselves, and monthly limits a manager approves. Look at how agents use tokens, not just the price: one day of logs found tool bugs costing an estimated $1.2M a year. Control what agents do, not only what they can access, because actions that are allowed on their own can be harmful together.

You'll leave with a process for adopting new models, a budget design you can copy, a way to find wasted spend in your own logs, and a measure for each recommendation that shows whether it's working.

## Anthony Ivan

Staff AI Forward Deployed Engineer, Databricks

Anthony Ivan is a Staff AI Forward Deployed Engineer at Databricks. He works directly with customers to build AI applications and agents and put them into production, and working with the Databricks' product and engineering teams to help improve the Databricks platform.

Anthony has 10 years of experience in AI, data science, and machine learning. As a Machine Learning Engineer at Shopify, he built AI agents and recommendation systems used by Shopify merchants around the world. As a Data Scientist at Grab, he helped grow Grab's food delivery service from zero to billions in sales.

Outside work, Anthony reads non-fiction across many subjects, spends time outdoors hiking, and is an avid photographer.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)