Building & Evaluating Real-World Systems: AI Agents and Elasticsearch

We’re thrilled to invite you to an exciting meetup!
We'll have one talk presented by an Elastic employee and one presented by a community member. Bring your questions and come support the community!

Agenda
5:00 PM – Doors Open
Come in, say hello, grab some food, and settle in for an engaging evening.
5:45 PM – "Lessons from evaluating production AI Agents for over a year", presented by Susan Chang, Principal Data Scientist at Elastic
6:15 PM – Q&A
6:30 PM – "Elasticsearch Journey – Working in Different Industries", presented by Yasir Zaid, Elastic Certified Engineer
7:00 PM – Q&A
7:15 PM – Networking & Event Wrap-Up
Stick around to chat, connect, and share insights with fellow attendees.

When:
Thursday, May 14th
5:00 - 7:00 pm

Where:
Centre for Social Innovation - Spadina
192 Spadina Ave. · Toronto, ON
3rd floor, The Viola Desmond Room

Abstracts
"Lessons from evaluating production AI Agents for over a year"

This talk covers methods of evaluating AI Agents, with an example of how the speakers built evaluation frameworks for a user-facing AI Agent system which has been in production for over a year. We share tools and frameworks used (as well as tradeoffs and alternatives), and discuss methods such as LLM-as-Judge, rules-based evaluations, ML metrics used, as well as selection tradeoffs.

Bio:
Susan Shu Chang is a Principal Data Scientist at Elastic, where she leads work on production-grade machine learning, including generative AI and agentic workflows. She is also an internationally recognized speaker, O’Reilly author, and keynote presenter at major global technical conferences.

My Elasticsearch Journey – Working in Different Industries

This talk explores Yasir Zaidi’s hands-on experience using Elastic products to deliver strategic solutions across banking, insurance, and telecommunications. Through real-world examples, the session will cover how Elasticsearch and the broader Elastic Stack have been used for search architecture, security, SIEM, and observability, along with some of the newer and more exciting projects now being built with Elastic. The talk will also highlight recent Elasticsearch features and innovations, and how they are opening up new possibilities for modern enterprise use cases.

Bio:
Yasir Zaidi is the Owner of ZD Inc. (https://zd-inc.net/) and Elasticsearch Experts (https://elasticsearch.expert/), and Co-Founder of 360metrics (https://www.360metrics.io/) and Certified Elasticsearch Partner Solution Architect. He has delivered hundreds of Elasticsearch projects for organizations around the world, with experience spanning Observability, SIEM, Enterprise search, Cloud deployments, and AI-powered search solutions, Serverless and much more. His work includes engagements with Ericsson, SAP, Intact Insurance, Videotron, RONA, Geotab and Desjardins Bank, just to name a few. Backed by three master’s degrees and Elastic certifications, Yasir brings deep technical expertise and proven global delivery experience. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasirzaidi/

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