Context Engineering: The Skill That Beat Prompts

Hosted by Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

Sun, Jul 26, 2026

9:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp & Certificate
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

See context as the real lever

Understand why what the model can see at action time matters more than how you word the request.

Fix a bad answer without touching the prompt

Improve a result by changing memory, history, and retrieved docs instead of rewriting the instruction.

Assemble context on purpose

A repeatable way to decide what goes into the window so the model has what it needs to be right.

Why this topic matters

Spending an hour polishing the perfect prompt, only to get a worse answer than a sloppy one with the right files attached, is the 2026 lesson. Context engineering is about what the model can see at the moment it acts, the memory, tools, history, and retrieved docs, not just how you phrase the ask. In this free 30 minute session you take a weak result and fix it by changing the context instead of the wording, watching the answer improve in real time. You leave knowing why context beats clever phrasing and how to assemble it deliberately.

You'll learn from

Aki Wijesundara

AI Advisor | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

Manu Jayawardana

AI Founder | Co-Founder & CEO at Krybe | Co-Founder of Snapdrum

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes.

He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.

Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.

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