Northbound AI Summit 2026

The console was never the product — it was the interim UI for infrastructure that could not yet describe itself. This keynote argues that the next platform shift is already visible at the edges: infrastructure declared next to application c…

You cannot fix what you cannot see, and most LLM apps ship blind. This workshop builds the observability stack for an AI application from first principles: structured traces for every model call and tool invocation, cost and latency attribu…

The most reliable AI app is the one that keeps working in airplane mode. Local-first AI stopped being a curiosity when small models crossed the "good enough" line for summarization, classification, and retrieval over personal data — all wor…

Everyone in this industry is spending someone else's margin. This panel brings together people who see the inference market from different seats — a capacity buyer at a scaled AI product, an economist covering compute markets, and an infras…

The fastest and cheapest LLM call is the one you never make. But semantic caching — reusing an answer because the question is "close enough" — is a correctness gamble that has burned every team that treated it as a drop-in. This talk maps…

Parsing model output with regexes is how you end up debugging production at midnight. Constrained decoding and schema-first output turned our flakiest integration surface into the most boring one, and this talk covers how to get there at sc…

Three agents made it to production. One triages support tickets, one migrates legacy code, one runs infrastructure remediations. All three nearly died in month two, each for a different reason. This talk is the post-mortem series: the tria…

Every platform team eventually faces the question: build the AI platform layer or buy it. Both answers are expensive and one of them is wrong for you specifically. This panel stages the argument properly, with a platform lead who built and…

The interesting documents were never plain text. Invoices, engineering drawings, medical forms, dashboards — the high-value pipelines are the ones that read pixels and text together, and they fail in ways pure-text systems never prepared us…