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

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

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 Muchhal

Product @ OpenAI

Fri Aug 28·4:00 PM UTC

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 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

Jason Liu

Developer Experience @ OpenAI

Mon Aug 31·4:00 PM UTC

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

Tue Sep 1·4:00 PM UTC

Gain a concrete technical blueprint for building agents that don't just get monitored in production but can systematically learn from failures, validate improvements, and get better over time.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Nikhil Pareek

Founder & CEO of Future AGI

Wed Sep 2·4:00 PM UTC

Coding agents no longer just autocomplete. They plan, act, and check their own work, and that shift lands hardest in large codebases. An agent that cannot see design docs, CI signals, or team conventions produces output nobody trusts, and unverified diffs move the bottleneck to review. As longer context and on-demand tooling raise the ceiling, the scarce resource becomes engineer attention.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Daisy Hollman

Member of Technical Staff @ Anthropic

Thu Sep 3·3:00 PM UTC

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You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Jay Rodge

Senior Developer Advocate for LLMs @ NVIDIA

Sun Sep 6·4:00 PM UTC

Forward Deployed Engineers turn promising AI technology into customer outcomes. Learn what the role looks like in practice, why it is becoming essential to enterprise AI adoption, and how to build the blend of technical depth, customer instinct, and delivery speed that companies hire for.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Phani Kolanuvada

Senior Director of Forward Deployed Engineering @ Salesforce

Mon Sep 7·3:00 PM UTC

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

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

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

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

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

Wed Sep 16·7:00 PM UTC

Figma MCP vs. Paper MCP: What Evals Actually Tell You

AI tools can produce impressive demos, but choosing between them requires more than intuition. This session uses a head-to-head comparison of Figma MCP and Paper MCP to show how structured evals reveal meaningful differences in quality and performance, giving attendees a practical framework for evaluating AI tools with confidence.

You'll learn from

Aishwarya & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Jessica Wang

Developer Advocate at Braintrust

Fri Sep 25·4:30 PM UTC

From Humans to AI Agents: The History of Search

AI agents are quickly moving from experimentation to production, with access to sensitive data, APIs, credentials, and critical business systems. In this 15-minute session, we’ll explore the new security challenges created by agentic applications and how teams can build with security in mind from day one. We’ll cover identity, secrets, access, and practical ways developers can securely connect agents to the tools and systems they need.

You'll learn from

Aish & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Mariane Bekker

Director of Developer Relations at 1Password

Sat Sep 26·4:00 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 Oct 5·4:00 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

Mon Oct 12·5:30 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 & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Jess Weng

Education Engineer @ LangChain

Mon Oct 19·4:00 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 & Arvind

AI Engineers | Building & Teaching @ The Gen Academy

Nikhil Nainani

FDE @ Palantir