Programme topic
Teams, leadership & work
Agents change roles, measures and handoffs as much as they change tooling. This collection looks at the leadership, craft, team design and human judgement required to make adoption productive rather than merely fast.
8 published talks
Talks about teams, leadership & work
Half our handoffs are the bot's idea
Adeline YawAI Integration Specialist, Automattic
About one in four conversations with WordPress.com's AI support bot ends with a person. In about half of those, the bot suggested it. These are two different problems. In one, the user asks for a person. In the other, the bot decides on its own to stop. On…
Lessons from Economics for the Human / Agent Software Workforce
Daniel NadasiPrincipal Engineer, Google
AI is reshaping software engineering, creating uncertainty about how engineering roles will change as increasingly capable systems take on work that was once performed by people. While no one can predict the future with certainty, history offers examples of…
The Model Wasn't the MOAT: How 10 Design System Engineers Turned Platform Knowledge into Enterprise AI
Sudharsanam NarasimhanSenior engineering manager, Design Systems & AI Developer Platforms, Atlassian
Most enterprise AI strategies begin with models, central AI teams, and a list of potential use cases. We started somewhere else: with a platform organisation that already shaped how more than 2,000 frontend engineers built software. A team of 10 engineers…
Token usage is the new lines of code (and it's just as useless)
Fawaz AhmadSenior Engineering Director, Canva
Canva hit mid-2026 with every AI metric a vendor could hand us and no answer to the only question the business actually cared about: is this working? Adoption flattened at around 85% of ~3,000 engineers, and the number stopped telling us anything. AI touched…
The five stages of losing our craft
Andrew MurphyCEO, Prudixa
Your best engineer won't use AI tools. Your tech lead is using them but won't tell anyone. Your new grads don't understand what the fuss is about. And you, the leader, are supposed to have answers for all of them. I've had some version of this coaching…
Management Is Dead, Leadership Is Not
Inga PflaumerConsulting CTO
Engineering teams are getting smaller. A team of four with strong AI tooling now ships what took twelve people two years ago, and the org chart has not caught up. The first layer to feel it is middle management - the coordination tier that existed largely to…
Shipping together in an AI native team
Sandra AratoSenior Software Engineer, Canva
While building an AI agent for marketing workflows at Leonardo.Ai, we discovered that the traditional design-to-engineering handoff was failing. A static mock could describe a happy path, but not how an agent would group assets, select tools, recover from…
The AI year: how we work, hire and grow now
Fiona ChanPartner & Technical Recruiter, Lookahead
For a lot of teams, this was the year AI stopped being an experiment and started being part of the job. Shipping got faster, but so did the pace, the pressure and the pile of code waiting for review. Drawing on Lookahead's 2026 research with people across…