Global AI Builder Series: by The Gen Academy

Mon Aug 17·3:00 PM UTC

Most useful agents depend on proprietary context, not just model intelligence. Builders need patterns for connecting data, tools, and workflows while preserving observability and quality, so agents answer with the right context and can be improved after deployment.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Logan Markewich

Head of Open Source @ LlamaIndex

Tue Aug 18·12:00 AM UTC

RAG helps AI applications find the right information before generating an answer. But the quality of that answer depends entirely on how the data is stored, searched, and retrieved. Arjun will show how to use Pinecone to choose the right retrieval method, structure data effectively, and improve RAG accuracy across different types of user queries.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Arjun Patel

Senior Developer Advocate @Pinecone

Tue Aug 18·4:00 PM UTC

AI is moving faster than traditional product and GTM playbooks can keep up with. As open models reshape economics and model capabilities commoditize, startups must rethink where durable differentiation comes from. This conversation explores how product, marketing, developer relations, distribution, and brand work together to build enduring AI companies.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Alan Hsia

Senior Vice President - Marketing @ Nebius

Thu Aug 20·4:00 PM UTC

Modern AI capability is increasingly shaped after pre-training. This session breaks down the systems behind NVIDIA Nemotron, from SFT and RLVR to verifiers, reasoning control and infrastructure, so builders can understand how today’s reasoning and agentic models are actually trained, evaluated and improved.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Chris Alexiuk

Product Research Engineer and Developer Advocate @ NVIDIA

Fri Aug 21·4:00 PM UTC

Agents are shipping decisions into production faster than enterprises can govern them. Dashboards only tell you what went wrong after it happened. The next phase of adoption will be defined by who operationalizes trust and an AI control plane like Fiddler's is how enterprises govern AI activity as it happens, not after.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan

AI Entrepreneur | Ex-Google, Microsoft

Arvind Narayanamurthy

AI Engineering Lead | Founder

Nick Nolan

Solutions Engineering Manager, Fiddler AI

Sun Aug 23·5:00 PM UTC

Powerful AI models are rapidly becoming accessible to everyone. The real advantage will come from how quickly your team learns. This session explores how agents, living business context and compounding memory can help small teams make better decisions, move faster and build an intelligence advantage that grows over time.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Praneet Dutta

Co-founder and CEO of Pomo

Mon Aug 24·6:00 PM UTC

Teams are no longer debating whether agents matter; they are deciding which kind to build, where value shows up, and what breaks in production. Sam's taxonomy gives builders a practical map across customer-facing, internal, and developer-platform agents, plus the cost, accuracy, rollout, and platform lessons that separate prototypes from shipped systems.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Sam Bhagwat

Co-founder and CEO @ Mastra

Wed Aug 26·4:00 PM UTC

AEO and the Era of Agent-Assisted Discovery

Discovery is no longer a list of blue links. Consumers now start with an assistant that answers, compares, and increasingly acts on their behalf. AI-referred traffic to retail, travel, and financial services sites is compounding fast, and those visitors convert differently. Brands that learn how to earn visibility inside model-generated answers now will own demand before agentic traffic scales.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Vivek Pandya

Director @ Adobe

Thu Aug 27·3:30 AM UTC

Fireside Chat with Abhi Muchhal (Product @ OpenAI)

AI is shifting from reactive prompting to persistent, connected workflows. Codex shows what this looks like in practice: shared context, interoperable tools, proactive automation, and enterprise collaboration. This conversation explores how agentic workspaces can change how teams build, create, and operate.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Abhi Muchchal

Product @ OpenAI

Thu Aug 27·5:00 PM UTC

Secure Autonomous Agents with NVIDIA NeMo Claw

Autonomous agents are useful because they can take actions, call tools, and run long workflows, but that same power creates enterprise risk. Jay's session shows builders how to keep model and harness choice while adding sandboxing, guardrails, observability, evaluation, and deployment paths so agents can move from demos to controlled production systems.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Jay Rodge

Senior Developer Advocate for LLMs @ NVIDIA

Fri Aug 28·4:00 PM UTC

Memory for Agents: Personalization Beyond the Context Window

Long-lived agents need continuity, but poor memory creates stale context, privacy risk, and user mistrust. Builders need patterns for what to remember, how to retrieve it, and when to forget so agents become more useful over time without becoming unpredictable or intrusive.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Rudraj Mehta

Product @ Mem0

Fri Aug 28·6:00 PM UTC

Codex Masterclass

Codex can do far more than generate code—but only when it has the right context, tools, and feedback loops. This session shows how to delegate bigger tasks, let Codex validate its own work, and review results efficiently, so teams can move faster without lowering their standards.

You'll learn from

Aish & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Dominik Kundel

Developer Experience @ OpenAI

Mon Aug 31·4:00 PM UTC

Fireside Chat with Ben Relles (CEO- Make Believe)

AI is turning video from something we watch into something we can interact with. But building great AI experiences takes more than impressive models. This fireside chat explores what Ben's company Make Believe has learned about digital humans, creativity, storytelling, and building real products as the technology rapidly evolves.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Ben Relles

Founder and CEO of Make Believe

Mon Aug 31·5:30 PM UTC

Beyond Simple Agents: Building with LangChain Deep Agents

Most agents today work well on short, simple tasks but struggle when work becomes longer and more complex. Deep Agents introduce the building blocks needed to go further: planning, memory, context management, delegation, and execution. These patterns help developers build agents that can handle real-world workflows more reliably.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Jess Weng

Education Engineer @ LangChain

Tue Sep 1·6:00 PM UTC

Optimizing Open Models for Production

Open models are getting dramatically larger and more capable, which makes serving them efficiently a systems problem of its own. This session explores modern inference techniques used to make state-of-the-art open models practical in production, covering caching, kernels, quantization, speculative decoding, and disaggregated inference, with lessons from the recent Kimi K3 launch and its production-scale vLLM integration.

You'll learn from

Aish & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Sujee Maniyam

Developer Relations @ Nebius

Fri Sep 4·4:00 PM UTC

The FDE Playbook: What No Job Description Tells You

Forward Deployed Engineers are becoming one of the most sought-after roles in AI, yet very few people understand what the job actually entails. In this session, Nikhil Nainani, FDE @ Palantir, shares hard-earned lessons from 4+ years on the front lines, covering the mindset, technical skills, and customer-first approach required to turn ambitious AI ideas into production reality.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Nikhil Nainani

FDE @ Palantir

Sun Sep 6·4:00 PM UTC

Loop & Harness Engineering Masterclass

Loop and harness engineering is not another AI buzzword. In this masterclass, we move beyond the hype and focus on what it actually takes to build agents that work through tasks reliably. You’ll see how thoughtful loop design and the system around it can turn a promising demo into something capable of handling real work.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan

AI Entrepreneur | Ex-Google, Microsoft

Arvind Narayanamurthy

AI Engineering Lead | Founder

Mon Sep 7·3:00 PM UTC

Fireside Chat with Avinav Pashine (Product Lead @ Meta)

AI is moving beyond screens. The next generation of systems will increasingly understand where we are, what we are doing, and what is happening around us. This conversation explores how wearables, multimodal AI, and physical context could reshape agents, interfaces, and the way humans interact with intelligent systems.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Avinav Pashine

Product Lead AI for Wearables (CV/LLM) @Meta

Mon Sep 7·5:00 PM UTC

LLM Fine-Tuning Decision Framework

As open and hosted models improve, the harder question is not whether fine-tuning works, but when it is worth the cost. A clear decision framework helps teams trade off quality, latency, data, maintenance, and deployment complexity before committing to a model strategy.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Sinan Ozdemir

Head of AI Developer Education @ Fireworks AI

Tue Sep 8·4:00 PM UTC

The Signal Loop: What to BUILD when you can build anything

Building AI products has become easier than ever, but getting people to choose them is now the real challenge. As AI products begin to look and sound alike, success depends on your signal, not just your technology. Learn how to define a measurable loss function for product signal and build feedback loops that help the right customers discover, trust, choose, and champion what you build. every day.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Lena Hall

Senior Director, Developers & AI - Akamai

Wed Sep 9·4:00 PM UTC

How to Deploy AI Agents to Production (Live RAG Demo) ⭐

Building an AI application is only half the challenge. Getting it to run reliably in production is where most teams struggle. Containers make AI agents and RAG applications portable, scalable, and easier to deploy across environments. This session will cover practical deployment patterns and a live RAG walkthrough to help you ship production-ready AI systems.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya Srinivasan & Arvind Narayan

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Rami Krispin

Senior Manager, Data Science & Engineering | Docker Captain | LinkedIn Learning

Thu Sep 10·11:15 PM UTC

Fireside Chat with Chris Taylor, VP & Fellow at Google

AI is moving from standalone models to systems that can reason, use tools, and take action. This fireside chat offers a leadership perspective on the opportunities, tradeoffs, and organizational shifts shaping what comes next.

You'll learn from

Aish & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Christopher Taylor

VP, Engineering Fellow at Google

Fri Sep 25·4:30 PM UTC

From Humans to AI Agents: The History of Search

Search is becoming much more than a way to find information. As AI shifts from answering questions to taking action, search is becoming a critical layer for grounding, reasoning, and decision-making. Understanding this evolution helps builders see how agents will access the web, discover information, and interact with the world.

You'll learn from

Aish & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Mariane Bekker

Head of DevRel @ You.com | Founder & Investor @ Founders Bay