Software Development

How do organizations in regulated industries build AI systems that are not only innovative, but also responsible, safe, and trustworthy? What can pharma teams learn from practical approaches to AI governance, and how should we evaluate generative and autonomous systems when benchmarks alone are not enough? This meetup brings together two complementary perspectives on AI in regulated environments — from building responsible, governed AI programs in pharma to designing meaningful evaluation approaches for generative and agentic systems in real-world use cases. Together, the talks will explore how to move beyond hype, understand common failure modes, and build evaluation and governance practices that reflect actual system behavior, risk, and impact. ### Why you should attend? * Practical perspectives on responsible AI, governance, and safety in pharma * A clearer understanding of why benchmarks are not enough for AI evaluation * Insight into common failure modes of generative and agentic systems * Simple frameworks and techniques for designing better evaluations * New ideas for building trustworthy AI in regulated industries ### Program: **17:30 – 18:00** Registration & coffee **18:00 – 18:10** Welcome **18:10 – 19:00** Presentations * **AI Transformation in Pharma: Building Responsible, Safe and Governed Systems,** Filip Rais * **Responsible AI and Ai Safety,** Pavel Vácha **19:00 – 19:20** Q&A / discussion **19:20 – 20:00** Networking See you there! Please note: photos and/or short videos may be taken during this event for use in our promotional and marketing materials (website, social media, newsletters, etc.). If you prefer not to be photographed or recorded, please let an organizer know when you arrive and we will do our best to accommodate your request.

It's open gaming night again! Come alone (or with friends) and meet some new people to game with. Just look for the 'Open Gaming' table(s) and feel free to sit in. We'll keep the games pretty light, so if you don't know many games, don't feel intimidated. Instruction is always available. (70,- gaming fee still applies)

💪 Group Strength Training – All Fitness Levels Welcome Looking for a motivating workout without having to figure everything out on your own? Join us for a coached group strength training session where you'll improve your fitness, learn proper technique and train alongside other motivated people. Whether you're already active or just getting back into exercise, you're welcome to join. ✅ All fitness levels welcome ✅ Professional coaching ✅ Strength & conditioning training ✅ Friendly and supportive atmosphere ✅ Come solo or with friends Our coach will guide the session, adjust exercises when needed and make sure everyone gets a great workout regardless of experience level. The goal isn't competition. It's about moving, getting stronger and enjoying the process together. 💪 Build strength ⚡ Improve fitness 🤝 Train with great people Many participants join alone, making it a great way to stay active while meeting other motivated people around Prague. 📍 Sportovní areál Tenis Cibulka, V Stráni 485/11, Prague 5 Hosted by Mates 👋 ⚠️ Meetup RSVP alone does not reserve your spot. To secure your place, please register here: [https://www.bananasport.cz/sportovni-udalost/34#](https://www.bananasport.cz/sportovni-udalost/34#) See you at training!

**What does it mean to belong somewhere — and who gets to decide?** Agora Network and [MigAct](https://migact.net/cs/) invite you to participate in an evening of dialogue centered around **exploring the experience of migration, identity, and what it means to make a home in a place that wasn't always yours**. We'll be using the [DEMOS Dialogue](https://democracydialogues.eu/) methodology: a structured, facilitated conversation designed to move beyond debate and into genuine exchange. The DEMOS model is built on a simple but powerful idea: that people with different perspectives and lived experiences can think together — not to reach consensus, but to understand each other more honestly. **No speeches, no winning arguments. Just real conversation.** What to expect: * **A welcoming, low-pressure atmosphere open to people of migration background and local Czech residents alike** * **Facilitated small-group dialogue using the DEMOS method** * **Reflection on themes of belonging, identity, and what we share across difference** * **About 2 hours, with time to connect informally afterward** Whether you were born here or arrived recently, your perspective matters. This event is for anyone willing to listen as much as they speak Space is limited to keep conversations intimate — reserve your spot below. Please fill out this registration form: https://forms.gle/35qpwEtCxY8cHKTn9

Join us for a fun craft event where you get to know new people and practice czech! We are more than excited to try out our newest concept: Czech Craft Club! This is not a Czech course but we will provide plenty of opportunities to pick up on new craft and related vocabulary. Low pressure, social and creative language exposure. Come listen to some czech and maybe even speaking some with your fellow crafters. We always prepare a special theme with a related games, craft and slovniček. All levels welcome! The event is hosted by expat organisation something new and local Czech artist Alžběta Procházkova. A match made in heaven 💘 Curious? Sign up! All materials and some prints provided! Ticket: 300kc - (All inclusive, craft materials and prints provided) Reservations: [https://connect.boomevents.org/en/somethingnew-uqvwe/czechcrafts-june2026](https://connect.boomevents.org/en/somethingnew-uqvwe/czechcrafts-june2026) ‼️Places are limited to guaranty quality learning and crafting

Learning Czech can be hard and demotivating, especially when studying alone. **This meetup is a shared study session where we come together to stay focused, motivated, and make progress — each in our own way.** This is a co-learning / co-studying session, not a class. There is no teacher, no lesson, and no study material provided. Everyone comes with their own resources and studies independently, in a shared environment. 🧠 **How it works** • We all bring our own material: • textbooks • homework from a Czech course • Duolingo or other apps • reading practice • vocabulary review, etc. • We mainly work individually • We are free to: • ask questions • help each other • share tips and resources • No teacher, no formal structure, no pressure 👥 **Who is it for?** • Czech learners of all levels • Non-Czech speakers (expats, internationals) • Czech native speakers are welcome if they want to help, but this is not a language exchange ⏱ **Practical info** • Location: Cafedu 12, Škrétova 490, 120 00 Praha 2 (Metro A and C, Muzeum station) • Duration: 2 hours, or less or more, as you want • Day & time: Monday, 18:00 • Group size: small group for now • Free event — please support the café by ordering a drink ☕ If you’re learning Czech and lack motivation when studying alone, come join us — let’s find it together 🙂

This meetup is for foreigners, expats, and newcomers who want to practice Czech in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. We will speak mostly in simple Czech, but beginners are welcome too. The goal is to gain confidence, improve your speaking, and meet new people. Come for conversation, tea or coffee, and a cozy community feel. It's free in community centre U Studánky 15.Praha 7 Organised by Diakonia.

Ahoj Péhapkáři! Zveme vás na další sraz komunity. 🎤 Martin Vaško - Benchmarking agentů 🎤 Tomáš Fejfar - Jak jsme potřetí přepsali agenta 🎤 Adam Štrauch - Efektivní nasazení kódu přes AI agenta 17:30 – open doors 18:00 – přednáška 18:40 – přednáška 19:20 – přednáška 20:00 - kvíz & networking Děkujeme našim partnerům a těšíme se na viděnou! Adresa: Keboola - Dělnická 191/27, Praha 7-Holešovice \-\-\-

**There is still capacity in the event!** 🎉 **You just need to add yourself to WAITLIST - and we will review your registration and confirm you!** Just because the venue capacity is limited, to ensure the best experience & relevance for the community, the registrations are not auto-confirmed - but managed this way. Without a previous confirmation email, we won't be able to let you in! 😢 \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- Join your local observability community for an evening of open source inspiration, real-world stories, and meaningful connections - all in a laid-back, meetup-style setting. This event will feature a recap of the [GrafanaCON](https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/) keynote, combined with fresh voices from your own community. Grafana team members walk through Grafana 13 and the most impactful improvements across the platform. Learn about how Grafana is becoming easier and safer to operate as production infrastructure, with updates that improve configuration management, recovery, and long-term maintainability. The session showcases significant advances in core user workflows, including more flexible and powerful dashboards, with improved performance. Whether you’re building dashboards, scaling Kubernetes, contributing to open source, or just getting started - this meetup is for you! **🎟 Free to attend** 🍕 Pizza + soft drinks provided 🤝 Built for connection 💡 Real talks from real practitioners \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **AGENDA:** **17:30 - 18:00**: Arrivals and pizza **18:00 - 18:30:** GrafanaCON recap presentation - by **Grafana Labs** team: **Jára Benc,** Staff Software Engineer & **Juraj Michalek**, Senior Solutions Architect **18:30 - 18:45:** Q & A **18:45 - 19:40:** Community talks ***1\. "Who gets paged? Unit\-testing Grafana notification policies\.*" by Martin Fryč, Staff Infrastructure Engineer at SentinelOne** \*Grafana notification policies decide who wakes up at 3am, and a single mistyped label can silently reroute an alert into the wrong team's branch. Grafana 13 and grafana-operator let teams own their slice of the policy tree, but Alertmanager still evaluates one merged tree, so a too-broad matcher in team A's subtree can quietly swallow team B's alerts. This talk shows a small Go tool that treats routing as code: declarative "given these labels, expect these receivers" assertions, run in CI against the assembled policy. We will walk through the routing semantics, real misroutings the tool can catch, and why multi-tree provisioning makes this test layer more necessary, not less. **2\. "*Using OpenTelemetry in development of resin 3D printers*" by** **Pavel Štrobl** \*In this talk we will take a look how it's possible to get metrics from upcoming resin printers from Prusa Research using OpenTelemetry, why it was not possible to use Prometheus Remote Write and the quirks while getting metrics from hardware constrained environment. **19:40 - 21:30**: Discussion and more pizza Note that by registering for this event you consent to related event & product communications from Grafana Labs and agree to our[ code of conduc](https://grafana.com/events/events-code-of-conduct/)t \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **​PLEASE NOTE**: at the SentinelOne office, in line with the venue security requirements - all meetup attendees will be required be verified by their\*\* ID card (or passport\*\*), also to\*\* sign a generic ND\*\*A used for all office visitors and to wear a visitor badge with their name during the whole event - to be able to attend the meetup

We give you a full **explanation of the KPI Framework.** > ​Do You **Measure** the Most Valuable KPIs? Red/Amber/Green Thresholds for Each of Your Levels Explained. ## ​Situation ​You burn $$$ on AI tokens. You run hackatons. Git repo full of AI pilots. ​You're spending more on AI than last year. ​Yet, you can't shake the feeling that you're paying faster than you're shipping. > ​📣 We give you the manual to pick the top KPIs that demonstrate the value, based on the context of how far you are in AI adoption. ​3 CTOs share where they actually are on the AI adoption ladder, what worked, what they'd undo, and what comes next. ​✅ The 3 KPIs you should actually be tracking at each level. And the ones to stop tracking. ​The 5 levels of AI adoption, mapped from engineering orgs. ​**1️⃣ L1: Nothing in production.** How to leave it without burning two quarters on pilots. ​**2️⃣ L2: Talent:** upskilling, reskilling and firing. ​**3️⃣ L3: Proof:** When the cost curve overtakes the delivery curve, and how to calculate AI efficiency proof? ​**4️⃣ L4: Going AI-native:** What concretely changes when AI moves from IDEs into production. ​**5️⃣ L5: You've won** the AI race. Where's the new edge in 2027? ​Bring your situation. By the end you'll know which level you're on, what is your KPI, what your next move is, and what to stop doing this quarter. ​No hype, no AI gospel. Two practitioners, real experience, with answers. *** ​20-minute lightning talks + Q&A followed by legendary networking! ***  ## ​What makes our meetups different: * ​**Action-oriented:** Every talk includes takeaway guides/frameworks you can photograph or access via QR code * ​**Case study focused:** Real implementations, real results, real failures * ​**Interactive:** Audience Q&A with people who've actually done this * ​**Practical:** Skip the vendor pitches—hear from practitioners *** > ​Perfect for engineering leaders tired of AI marketing fluff who want practical insights.

Talk 1 **Title: The Platform Is the People: SLAs, DORA and Trust at Billions of Requests a Month** By: Harry Bouras Role / LinkedIn: AI & Cloud Engineering leader, formerly heading the API organisation of a leading, extremely global and multicultural corporation. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-bouras/ Abstract: Most "platform" talks are about tools. This one isn't. Heading the API organisation of a leading, extremely global and multicultural corporation, interconnecting decades of legacy systems while serving billions of requests a month and scaling across both Azure and Google Cloud, taught me a contrarian lesson the hard way: at that volume, platforms don't fail on technology, and cloud bills don't explode because of bad Terraform. They fail, or succeed, on how the organisation is set up to own, deliver and grow the thing. The org chart is the real architecture. I'll walk through the levers that actually moved the needle, each anchored in real moments from that scale. How SLAs, framed as clarity rather than punishment, change engineer behaviour more than any dashboard. Why extending trust and time to a team up front - the most uncomfortable thing a leader can do, is precisely what raises build quality and cuts the rework you can't afford at billions of requests. What genuinely changed when we dragged a waterfall-shaped organisation toward iterative, Scrum-based delivery, and why that was about shortening feedback loops, not adding ceremonies. And how DORA metrics became our objective answer to a question every team argues about: what actually makes a successful Senior Software Engineer and what a DevOps engineer? Then the human core, told honestly, which means told as comedy. What makes a good manager in this world, narrated through the things I was certain about and was completely wrong about. The running joke is also the real point: nearly every instinct that made me a good engineer made me a mediocre manager until I unlearned it. Finally, a look at what we're all about to get wrong together: AI is forcing DevOps to grow up into DevSecOps - and the teams that handle it well will be the ones that already have the ownership, trust and growth culture this talk is really about. Talk 2 **Postmortem Culture: Turning Failures into Learning, Not Blame** By: Dani Yelovitch Most engineering teams treat incidents as embarrassments to bury — a quick fix, a vague Slack message, and everyone moves on. This talk argues for a different approach: treating every failure as a gift. The core idea is blameless postmortems — a practice pioneered at Google and Netflix where the goal isn't to find a scapegoat, but to understand how the system (people, tools, processes) allowed a failure to happen in the first place. If a human made a mistake, the real question is: why did the system make that mistake easy to make? The talk would cover: What a good postmortem looks like (and the common ways they go wrong) How to run a blameless review without it becoming a blame-by-committee session Turning action items into actual change, not a graveyard doc nobody reads Building psychological safety so engineers report problems early instead of hiding them The key takeaway: teams that learn from failure faster than their competitors ship better software with fewer catastrophic incidents — not because they have better engineers, but because they've built better feedback loops. **Talk 3:** Title: From Service Organization to Self-Service: Platform Engineering in Action By Pavel Bureš from Sky Modern engineering organisations accumulate platform silos faster than they can pay them down — each team picking its own way to provision workloads, databases, queues and caches, each with subtly different security, observability and cost profiles. In this talk we share how we are tackling that problem at scale through a Platform Engineering practice built on the principle of a unified, abstracted interface for application-centric configuration — an approach that shifts platform teams from "ticket-driven plumbing" to product thinking: stable contracts, golden paths, and self-service by default. In the second half we zoom in on PEaaS (Persistence Engineering as a Service), our concrete implementation of these principles for stateful workloads. We will walk through the architecture — Crossplane 2.0 composition functions on EKS, application-centric Kubernetes claims (XRs), and a tenant-onboarding model that automates IAM, VPC endpoints, OIDC and S3 provisioning — and how it abstracts heterogeneous backends (Keyspaces, Aurora DSQL, Redis Cloud, and Kafka on EKS) behind one consistent interface. Attendees will leave with: A practical pattern for designing engineering platforms in their own organisations. A reference architecture for persistence-as-a-service on Crossplane. Honest lessons on standardisation, tenant onboarding and platform adoption.

It's summer! That means it's time for our special summer edition - grill & chill. The pub offers grilled food - you don't need to take your own. Doors open at **18:30**. There will be only lightning talks. You can have a lightning talk as well – please register at [Lightning Talks – bit.ly/prpylight](https://bit.ly/prpylight). **Good to know** * You don’t have to register for this meetup – the actual attendance is much bigger (40–70 Pythonistas) than indicated in the “Going” list here. * **Cash only payments – club doesn’t accept cards.** * Talks at Pyvo are mostly in Czech but it there’s somebody who doesn’t understand Czech talks are switched to English if the speaker is able to do so. * Besides both soft drinks and beer it's possible to eat at the club. Choice is variable and consists of 4 to 7 options ranging from toast, sausages and soup to fried cheese in a bun, goulash or schnitzel. * Club closes at midnight.

\*\*\*\*\* We're meeting both in-person and virtually via Skype depending on the week. Contact Sonya Lano for more information if you want to join \*\*\*\*\* This is for anyone wanting feedback! We mostly focus on novels and longer works, but short stories are welcome, as well. You can submit anything you want feedback on in any genre. Current word limit for submissions is 4,000 words. Send your submissions by 13:30 the Thursday before the meeting (or we have a grace period during which you can submit a lower limit of 2,500 words if you submit by midnight Thursday evening). Also, if you don't have time to read through everyone's submissions, still join the meeting! We know that busy schedules don't always make finding reading time easy. To submit, use the Dropbox folder. If you don't have access to it, send sonyalakadosch@yahoo.com your e-mail address so I can add you. Looking forward to seeing everyone there! My number in case of any confusion the day of the meeting is 737 118 530 - or on Facebook: Sonya Lano (https://www.facebook.com/sonya.lano) DROPBOX INFO: * add new submissions for the next meeting in the " submissions" folder for the meeting date. Put your name at the beginning of the file name (for example: "Sonya Somewhere in the Dark") * When providing written feedback (not required, but deeply welcome), save the file as a separate document on your device, then mark your changes/ feedback in the saved file. After you're finished, put the file in the "Feedback" folder under the folder for the meeting date and then under the person the feedback is for (e.g. "For Sonya"). * The submissions folder will be replaced within a week after the meeting has taken place. Feedback will be deleted within 2 months after the meeting, so if you need it longer than that, make sure to copy it to your own disk.

This group is for anyone who writes - for any reason. Have a thesis or article you need to write? Trying to finish a novel or an academic paper? This group is for you. We are currently meeting in-person at Locus Workspace. If you have any questions, contact Sonya Lano here or on Facebook or Messenger (https://www.facebook.com/sonya.lano). We start at 9:00, introduce ourselves, and share a few words about what we're working on and what we hope to accomplish during the session. At the end of the session, you can give us a brief recap of how it went. We'll break at noon. The afternoon session starts at 2:00 pm. You're welcome to join both sessions or just one. Please come as close to 9:00 as you can if you come for the morning session. If you come to the afternoon session, we are usually back by about a quarter to 2:00.

Columbus Code & Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. People of all skill levels attend, and we love it that way. Many people (optionally) bring projects to work on, and many other people (optionally) socialize the entire time. It's entirely up to you! **What to Expect at the Intro Circle** \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ Near the beginning of the event (1:30 pm), we do a standup: * Organizer announcements, updates, and logistics Round 1 - (7 secs max): * Your name * What you're working on * What you can help others with Round 2: * Community events you wanna plug. If none, that's cool too. Round 3: * Job opportunities you're hiring for OR announce that you are looking for one. If none, that's cool. After the introduction circle, everything is self-organized! Feel free to work alone, pair up, attend one of our workshops/presentations, or mingle!

Join the Columbus AI community for a special event. **Battle of the Personal Agents** is your chance to see what people are actually building with AI agents and personal automation systems. Whether you’re running OpenClaw, Hermes, or a completely custom solution, bring your agent and show the community how it works. We’re interested in real-world implementations: the problems your agent solves, how you use it day-to-day, how it’s hosted and managed, how you built it, and why you’ve chosen to keep using it. Live demonstrations are encouraged, so be prepared to show your code, architecture, workflows, and your agent performing real tasks. This is less about polished presentations and more about sharing practical experience, comparing approaches, and learning from one another. If you’d like to present, please contact Chris Slee (via meetup) before the event so we can allocate enough time for everyone’s demonstrations. Come ready to show what you’ve built, discover what others are doing, and maybe find a few ideas worth taking home. Whether you’re deep in the field or just getting curious, come connect with others building and exploring AI in Columbus. Sponsored by [Transform Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/transformlabs/) Sign up also accessible via [Transform Labs Luma](https://luma.com/transformlabshq)

Over a billion documents processed. Millions of Veterans impacted. Hundreds of thousands of employee hours saved. Faster decisions. Greater accuracy. More benefits in the hands of our disabled Veterans. We created Smart Search, the world’s largest consumer of Amazon Textract, right when GenAI began reshaping what’s possible. Since then, we’ve built a suite of AI‑driven solutions that transform this data into real, measurable outcomes—accelerating benefits decisions for our Nation’s Veterans. Join us for a focused conversation on how an outcome‑driven approach to AI is helping us boost accuracy, streamline workflows, and deliver faster results for those who have served. This is a follow up to the AWS re:Invent 2023 "Intelligent Document Processing with Gen AI for Public Sector" presentation. About Speaker: Cameron Williams is a Senior Technical Project Manager and cross-functional technical leader at Booz Allen Hamilton with 15+ years of experience architecting and evolving scalable, cloud-native systems, from greenfield development to complex enterprise modernization. https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronw711/ **THANK YOU** *Franklin University* for hosting our meetup! To learn more about *Franklin University*, please visit their website: https://www.franklin.edu/ **DIRECTIONS** Franklin University Fisher Hall 300 E. Main St, Columbus, OH 43215 Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jxjBA2hUmS5qrvhq8 Parking is FREE! Please park in Lot C in front of Fisher Hall. See attached map. NOTE: Map the address only. When mapping with Google Maps it may use the Fisher Hall at OSU, which is NOT correct. **Want to sponsor the pizza and/or bar tab?** Please contact me if you would like to sponsor this meetup's pizza and/or bar tab: angelo@mandato.com

## 🤝 Host Information A co-hosted event by ProductTank Columbus & Women in Product Columbus 💡 About the Workshop AI adoption is stalling across organizations — not because of a lack of motivation or tools, but because it's fundamentally a behavior design challenge. This hands-on workshop applies proven Behavior Design models and methods to help you move from a vague organizational wish to boost AI adoption to 3-5 concrete, testable interventions you can act on starting tomorrow. Whether you're a product manager, on a product team, or just someone trying to get AI to actually stick at work, you'll leave with a clear picture of what's worth focusing on, what to ignore, and how to drive real, sustained adoption — no guesswork required. 🛠️ What to Bring Laptop: Fully charged and ready to go. AI Assistant: Have your favorite AI assistant pulled up. (Dom will be using Claude, but feel free to use whichever assistant you prefer!) 🍕 Logistics & Perks Food & Drink: Pizza and drinks provided! Parking: Plenty of free spaces available on-site. ###

We are bringing Microsoft Build sessions to Columbus Ohio! The Central Ohio Azure Meetup and Central Ohio .NET Developer's Group (CONDG) are coming together to bring some of the labs and breakouts from Microsoft Build to your backyard. In this free, 1 day event, you are going to Build stuff with us! And yes, there will be free food. Please RSVP via [Microsoft Build //localhost:columbus | Microsoft Reactor](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/reactor/events/27247/).

**Important time note:** Please plan on arriving between 5:30 and 6:00 as the elevators lock after 6 and you'll need to message us and we'll need to come get you. The building address is 4450 Bridge Park The entrance is 6620 Mooney St, Suite 400 You will need to scan your ID at the door to get a visitor badge. **Abstract** *Customize the IDE: Building Extensions for Visual Studio Code* Visual Studio Code is one of the most widely used development environments today, and much of its flexibility comes from its extension ecosystem. Extensions allow developers to customize the editor with new features, integrations, and workflow improvements tailored to their needs. In this session, we’ll cover what extensions are and the different types available, including full extensions written in TypeScript or JavaScript, along with lighter-weight extensions such as color themes, language packs, language support, code snippets, and keymaps. We’ll also look at practical reasons a developer might create an extension, from automating repetitive tasks to adding custom tooling. The session includes a hands-on walkthrough of creating a new extension, testing it locally, and understanding the basic project structure. We’ll close with a brief overview of how extensions are packaged and published to the Visual Studio Marketplace and other distribution options. **YouTube Link** TBD

Most people still use AI like a search box: type one question, get one answer, repeat. But the next step is AI agents: systems that can take a goal, break it into steps, use tools, remember context, and produce useful work for a human to review. In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll demystify what AI agents actually are — without hype or jargon. We’ll walk through practical examples of how agents can help with research, planning, writing, coding, operations, and personal productivity. We’ll cover: * What makes an AI “agent” instead of just a chatbot * How agents break tasks into steps * Where agents are genuinely useful today * Where they fail, hallucinate, or need human review * How to design simple AI workflows for your own work * A live demo of an AI agent-style workflow from start to finish No coding experience required. This is for anyone who wants to understand where AI tools are going and how to use them more effectively right now. LOGISTICS AND PARKING: The talk starts at 7:00 PM. The first half hour is reserved for everyone to get set up and mingle. Free pizza and drinks! The cheapest parking option is to find street parking, which will only cost you a few bucks. Otherwise, park in the nearby veteran's museum lot for $8. It's highly recommended you avoid the nearby $15 garage parking.