AWS AI In Practice #1

Our inaugural event! We are delighted to welcome Danilo Poccia, Chief Evangelist (EMEA) at AWS, who will share insights on Strands Agents and AgentCore. Our second speaker is Diana Ionita, Serverless Consultant, who demonstrates how to treat AI like a coding partner.

Programme
18:00: Arrival, registration
18:15: TALKS START
20:00: Networking with food and a drink provided by the generosity of our sponsors.

Talk 1
From Prototype to Production with Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with Danilo Poccia

AI agents are a new class of software applications that use AI models to reason, plan, act, learn, and adapt in pursuit of user-defined goals with limited human oversight. Building AI agents that can reliably perform complex tasks has become increasingly accessible thanks to open source frameworks like Strands Agents. However, moving from a promising proof-of-concept to a production-ready agent that can scale to thousands of users presents significant challenges.

Through hands-on demos, we'll build a system from scratch and progressively deploy it to production using the comprehensive enterprise-grade services provided by AgentCore. You'll learn to implement key production capabilities, including secure session isolation, persistent memory, identity management, and real-time observability. The learnings can be applied to any framework and model, hosted on Amazon Bedrock or elsewhere.

Talk 2
My AI Coding Partner: Building the London Improv Calendar on AWS with Diana Ionita

What happens when you treat AI like a coding partner? In this talk, I’ll share how I used AI tools to build the London Improv Calendar - a fully serverless application on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more). This isn’t theory; it’s a practical, in-the-trenches account of working with AI as a solo engineer. We’ll cover what worked well, what fell flat, and where AI truly accelerated development. If you’re curious about pairing AI with serverless, or just want some real-world lessons you can apply to your own projects, this session is for you.

Remember to follow us @AWSUserGroupUK and on LinkedIn for the latest updates and you can find videos of our past meetups on YouTube.