Northbound AI Summit 2026

No slides, just terminals. This is a live tour of a production agent swarm doing real work: a fleet of specialized agents coordinating on tasks with checkpoints, retries, and a shared control plane — running against live infrastructure on s…

Vector search is a great first chapter and a terrible whole book. In production, the retrieval systems that hold up are hybrids: lexical search for precision, embeddings for recall, structured filters for correctness, and a reranker to arbi…

Retrieval went from research afterthought to the load-bearing wall of production AI, and most of what made it work for us was not in any paper. This keynote traces one retrieval stack over three years: naive vector search, the hybrid rebuil…

Four teams run open-weight models in production today, at four very different scales, and none of them made the same choices. This panel puts their engineering leads on one stage to compare notes for real: serving stacks, fine-tuning strate…

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…

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…

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…

Speakers meet your conference twice: once through the CFP form, once on stage. Most events lose great talks at the first meeting, and the data shows it — every additional required question measurably cuts submissions, and the cuts are not e…

Three days, five tracks, and several hundred hallway arguments deserve a synthesis. The closing panel brings program voices and audience favorites back on stage to separate what we actually learned this week from what merely sounded good in…