NYC AI Users - AI Talks: AI in Robotics and Agentic Event Driven AI

AI technology like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Midjourney and many others will play an increasingly large role in our day-to-day lives. To this end, New York AI Users will host our monthly tech talks & social gathering at Vellum AI's high rise office in downtown Manhattan. Vellum is an AI startup that develops agents to automate your boring ops tasks. It is also sponsored by Solace, an Agentic AI company powered by real-time data, and who is also providing free drinks and food for the event. The space and accommodations are perfect for our talks and the social time that follows.

From the creators and organizers of New York Tech & Beer®, New York AI Users organizes high-quality AI events that both educate and connect AI enthusiasts in the New York area who use or want to use AI to meet their creative, entrepreneurial, and technical aspirations. No technical background is required, only an interest in learning about these tools of the future. Founders, engineers, and creatives are all welcome!

For our March meeting, we will gather at Vellum and we will host talks on AI followed social time with the speakers and attendees for the remainder of the evening, with free drinks and food throughout.

The Talks:

• For our first talk, we will hear from Leah Robert. Why Agentic AI Needs to be Event Driven. "Many organizations are creating AI assistants to help reduce manual tasks and provide an easy way to talk with their data. As more and more agents are created in various environments, it becomes an integration and scaling issue to enable the agents to talk to each other. An event-driven architecture can provide the connectivity, scalability, and resiliency for an enterprise-grade deployment." Leah Robert is a Principal Sales Engineer at Solace, with a strong passion for technology and customer success. She brings deep expertise in software design and enterprise integration, supported by a technical background and hands-on experience working closely with customers to solve complex challenges. Leah holds a degree in Software Design from Queen’s University, where she was actively involved in leadership roles within the Computing Students’ Association.
• Our second talk will be by Lee Gaul, Robotics in AI. "The humanoid form factor is not the answer to the near-term challenges of embodied AI, and the gap between demo and reality is wider than it appears. From the excellent Robot Olympics, to over hyped viral robot videos, most examples tend to collapse under scrutiny, relying on teleoperation, sim-to-real shortcuts, and carefully staged conditions rather than genuine physical intelligence. The deeper story is about what embodiment reveals: the hard problems of affordance reasoning, grounded perception, and real-time physical inference are ones that large language models were never built to solve. The path to true agents, ones that act in the physical world, will require different architectures and more honest benchmarks than what the field is celebrating today." Lee Gaul is an accomplished AI advisor and speaker with a deep fascination for Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-powered chatbots, alignment, and education. With a background in philosophy from the University of Windsor and over a decade of experience in the tech industry, Lee brings a unique perspective to the rapidly evolving world of AI.

We’re excited to see you soon!