How to Run AI Agents in High-Stakes, Real-World Systems

Hosted by Emmanuel Paraskakis and Sri Kandikonda

Wed, Aug 12, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (45 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

115 students

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Build AI-Ready API Products With MCP
Emmanuel Paraskakis
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What you'll learn

Run a team of humans and AI agents side by side

See a product team work with an agent teammate that drafts and reviews PRDs across product and engineering every day.

Learn what production-grade guardrails look like

See the guardrails that keep agents inside enterprise, legal, security, and cost limits, and when a human takes over.

Move your agents beyond the prototype stage

Understand why agent projects die at POC, and the evals and human-in-the-loop discipline that take them to production.

Watch a live agent demo you can recreate

We spin up an AI agent teammate on a real workflow problem, with patterns you can apply immediately to build your own.

Why this topic matters

Anyone can demo an AI agent. Running one in the real world is another story. Production agents need more than intelligence. They need the right workflows, guardrails, tooling, and human collaboration to deliver reliable outcomes. Sri will share lessons from building and scaling agents beyond prototypes, how agents create value, where they fail, and what you'll need to make them work in production.

You'll learn from

Emmanuel Paraskakis

3x VP Product (Apiary, Swagger, Oracle) | Founder, Level 250 | Agent-ready APIs

I’m Emmanuel, 3x VP Product, now a founder at Level 250.

If you built or used APIs in the past 15 years, chances are you’ve used one of my products:

I’ve led some of the most influential API tools: Apiary (550,000+ APIs), Swagger (750,000+ APIs) and Oracle’s first Cloud-Native API Gateway. Before that, I built large B2B API programs at Verisk, Moody’s, and Precisely.

Today, I advise Fortune 500 CEOs and AI-forward startup founders on API Strategy, Developer Experience, MCP products, and AI agent readiness.

I'm also a member of OpenAPI and a featured speaker at apidays and other global technology conferences.

My passion is helping others build products, which is why I also teach on Maven: to share my lessons learned and help Product Managers and Engineers fast-track their careers.

Sri Kandikonda

Manager, Group Product @FedEx | Platform Products & APIs

I am a product leader focused on building and scaling digital platforms that drive revenue, unlock new business models, and power global commerce.

Over the past 15+ years across e-commerce, logistics, and fintech, I’ve worked at the intersection of product, technology, and business—leading platforms that operate at global scale. At FedEx, I lead the Visibility portfolio, powering shipment tracking and intelligence capabilities used by global supply chains and e-commerce platforms, processing over 1 billion transactions every day.

I’ve led the evolution of FedEx’s API ecosystem end-to-end—from product strategy to global go-to-market. This includes rolling out the developer platform across 200+ countries and building GTM approaches tailored to different customer segments supporting over $20B in business value across FedEx services, with 40% CAGR.

One of my key contributions has been building FedEx’s Visibility API, Real Time visibility, commercialization approach from the ground up—shifting APIs into revenue-generating products. The tracking portfolio evolved from a cost center into a profitable, data-driven business, now generating 8-figure ARR with over 100 million billable transactions per month.

Previously at

Verisk
Moodys
Oracle
SmartBear
Precisely
See all products from Emmanuel

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