Learn the 6 Durable AI Skills

Hosted by Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana

Sun, Nov 1, 2026

10:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp and Certificate: Build and Ship Production AI Agents
Dr. Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

Audit your skills against what the market asks

Compare what you know against what job descriptions have kept demanding.

Build depth in evaluation and cost

Focus on the two skills most people skip and employers most reliably test.

Choose frameworks by the skill underneath

Pick what to learn next based on transferable skill rather than hype.

Why this topic matters

Frameworks turn over every few months and chasing them is exhausting and unproductive. Six skills sit underneath all of them and have not changed: evaluation, context, cost, retrieval, debugging and system design. Building those deliberately means the next tool takes a weekend to learn rather than a quarter.

You'll learn from

Aki Wijesundara, PhD

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 | CEO at TAI Labs | 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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