/Events /AgentCon Boston /Schedule
AgentCon Boston
Saturday, September 27
Walk-in
Plenary ·Opening & Welcome
Plenary ·Agents of Tomorrow: Building the Next Generation of Intelligence
We stand at the edge of a profound shift in artificial intelligence. Over the last five years, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity—transforming how we create, code, and collaborate. Now, a new frontier is emerging: AI agents. Unlike traditional tools that wait for instructions, agents can perceive, decide, and act toward goals—expanding the boundaries of what humans and machines can achieve together.
In this keynote, we’ll explore the evolution from copilots to fully agentic systems, highlight breakthroughs that are reshaping industries, and imagine the future horizons where autonomous agents redefine productivity, creativity, and discovery. Most importantly, we’ll discuss the role of humans in this new era—not as bystanders, but as leaders guiding how agents operate, align with our values, and amplify our potential.
The Agents of Tomorrow are here—and the future will be built by those bold enough to partner with them.
Henk is a Cloud Advocate specializing in Artificial intelligence and Azure with a background in application development. He is currently part of the AI cloud advocate team and based in the Netherlands. Before joining Microsoft, he was a Microsoft AI MVP and worked as a software developer and architect building lots of AI powered platforms on Azure.
Building Actionable AI Agents with Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel & LangChain
In this hands-on bootcamp, we’ll start by building an AI agent directly in Azure AI Foundry using prompt orchestration, tools, and multi-turn planning. Once the agent is configured in the portal, we’ll take it a step further by demonstrating how to call the agent programmatically from your applications using both Semantic Kernel and LangChain (your choice of framework). You’ll learn how to enable agentic workflows that combine retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), secure enterprise data access, and multi-step task execution. The session concludes with a live demo where we integrate Azure AI Search and vector embeddings to build a production-ready agent capable of retrieving, reasoning, and taking action—all backed by a sample repository to kick-start your projects.
Proposed time: 90 Minutes
Udaiappa Ramachandran (Udai) is the CTO/CSO at Akumina, is a Microsoft Azure MVP, Cloud Expert, Organizer of New Hampshire Cloud .NET User Group (@nhcloud), and Speaker.
UX for AI Apps
AI applications promise to be more powerful than conventional apps, as chain saws are more powerful than hand saws. Enabling users to safely and effectively harness this power requires careful thought and new approaches. This talk will discuss the challenges that AI apps present to UX developers and designers, and ways in which these challenges can be met. Specific challenges of Agentic AI will be discussed. Examples of real and hypothetical apps will be shown.
David S. Platt teaches computer science at Harvard University Extension School, and at companies all over the world. He is the author of 12 books, including Introducing Microsoft .NET from Microsoft Press, and Why Software Sucks. He also wrote MSDN Magazine’s monthly back-page column “Don’t Get Me Started” for 10 years. Microsoft designated him a Software Legend in 2002. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
NANDA: The Internet of AI Agents
What happens when we have 100 million agents?
Join Maria Gorskikh and MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar for an interactive session exploring Project NANDA, a framework for decentralized discovery, communication, and identity among autonomous AI agents.
This overview of the NANDA architecture and goals will include demos and will leave you with a clearer idea of how to think about the future of AI agents at scale.
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab and directs the Camera Culture research group. His focus is on AI and Imaging for health and sustainability. They span research in physical (e.g., sensors, health-tech), digital (e.g., automated and privacy-aware machine learning) and global (e.g., geomaps, autonomous mobility) domains. He received the Lemelson Award (2016), ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award (2017), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2009), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), TR100 Award from MIT Technology Review (2004) and Global Indus Technovator Award (2003). He has worked on special research projects at Google [X] and Facebook and co-founded/advised several companies.
Project NANDA core contributor.
Lunch
Workshop 2 (36) ·From Static Files to Smart Agents: Unlocking Document Intelligence
Most organizations run on documents—PDFs, forms, contracts—but these are the hardest sources for AI to understand. Large language models struggle with messy layouts and unstructured text, leading to missed information and unreliable outputs.
In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn to combine document intelligence, OCR, and RAG with AI agents. We'll cover practical patterns for extracting structure from real documents, grounding agent responses in reliable sources, and automating report generation. You'll leave with a clear roadmap for turning static documents into intelligent knowledge that makes your AI agents more reliable and effective.
Prerequisistes Please install the software ahead of the workshop:
- VS Code
- Python 3.12 and PIP, also recommend installing the VS Code Python Extension - this will allow you to debug and step through code later
- (Optional) Prompty Extension - this will allow you to test prompts in VS Code
- Git and Github login - these will make working with the workshop easier on you
- Azure subscription - in order to use Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure AI Search you'll need a subscription (unless you are in the workshop on September 27, 2025 - see note below)
NOTE: For those of you in the workshop on September 27, 2025 - I will be providing you with the api keys to use predeployed Azure resources for the day only.
Jason is an independent consultant who focuses on Azure, Kubernetes, .NET, SQL Server, and Angular. He has 20+ years of experience architecting, designing, developing, and delivering software solutions using (mostly) Microsoft technologies. He is also a Microsoft Azure MVP and leads the North Boston Azure User Group.
Build Your Own AI Agent in One Hour
In this session, I'll walk you through how to build a smart, context-aware agent in just one hour. You'll see how OpenAI APIs, LangChain, and a simple Next.js app can work together to create an agent that goes beyond basic chat. With a demo and easy-to-follow steps, you’ll leave with the confidence to start building and customizing your own AI Assistant.
We'll cover: Core principles of AI agents and what makes them different from simple chatbots Step-by-step walkthrough of building an agent with LangChain and OpenAI APIs Demo of an AI agent running in a Next.js app Practical ways to customize agents for your own use cases
Emma is the co-author of "Generative AI for Web Development: Building Web Applications Powered by OpenAI APIs and Next.js", published by Apress. She is an active speaker in the open source and AI communities, and has presented talks on open source tools and building AI-powered applications across the U.S. and Europe. She is an AI and diversity advocate, and open source community builder.
Agent Development on Amazon Bedrock Leveraging John Snow Lab’s Medical LLM, a Healthcare AI example
John Snow Labs and AWS will jointly present and walkthrough a hands-on example of building and scaling agentic AI Workflows on Amazon Bedrock, and share how to leverage a private LLM to address healthcare privacy concerns for regulatory compliance.
Linda Chen, Chief Operating Officer at John Snow Labs has witnessed transformations and advancement of AI since her undergraduate study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been in Healthcare AI for over a decade, and helped many healthcare companies solve their most challenging unstructured document understanding pain points by bridging technical capabilities to business applications. Prior to John Snow Labs, Linda worked at Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Research. She also holds an MBA from London Business School and a Master degree in Statistics from Columbia University. She develops STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Math) educational products and methodology during her spare time to encourage more young girls to participate in STEM.
Beau Tse is a Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. He focuses on supporting AWS Partners through their partner journey and is passionate about enabling them on AWS. He is a recent graduate from Santa Clara University where he studied Information Systems and Computer Science.
Bringing AI Agents to Life with Azure AI Foundry
AI agents are moving beyond text boxes into real-world interactions — combining models, tools, and avatars to deliver human-like experiences. In this session, we’ll explore how to build an end-to-end solution with Azure AI Foundry, weaving together model selection, instruction design, and tool integration into a single workflow. As a live scenario, we’ll create an AI agent that can order a pizza through a connected MCP server — and then bring it to life with a real avatar for natural, conversational interactions. You’ll leave with a clear view of how to turn prompts and models into full-fledged, real-world AI agents.
Henk is a Cloud Advocate specializing in Artificial intelligence and Azure with a background in application development. He is currently part of the AI cloud advocate team and based in the Netherlands. Before joining Microsoft, he was a Microsoft AI MVP and worked as a software developer and architect building lots of AI powered platforms on Azure.
Hands-On: Deploy Your First Autonomous Engineer with LangChain Open SWE
Join us for an interactive workshop where you'll build and deploy your own AI-powered engineering agent using LangChain Open SWE's latest August 2025 release. In this hands-on session, you'll work through the complete implementation process alongside our instructors—from initial environment setup and API authentication to configuring and launching your first autonomous coding agent.
You'll get practical experience watching your agent generate, modify, and debug code in real-time while learning to interpret its decision-making patterns and output quality. We'll guide you through common configuration challenges, share optimization techniques, and provide actionable strategies for incorporating agentic engineering tools into your existing development processes.
Participants should bring a laptop with Node.js and yarn installed, plus basic familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript environments. They will need a gitbub account and API keys from either Anthropic, OpenAPI, or Google. By the end of this workshop, you'll have a working local setup and the knowledge to start experimenting with autonomous engineering agents in your own projects.
Technology leader with 20+ years engineering experience, currently a Management Consultant specializing in AI governance frameworks. He has extensive experience building high-performance engineering cultures and driving technical innovation.
Responsible AI panel
Prepare your questions about Responsible AI for Agents and you'll be able to get valuable insights from our speakers. The panel discussion will be led by Veronika Kolesnikova.
Closing
Sunday, September 28
Architecting Scalable AI Agent Platforms for Real-Time, Data-Driven Engagement
AI agents are rapidly transforming how organizations interact with customers, process data, and deliver personalized experiences at scale. This session presents an architectural blueprint for building cloud-based AI agent platforms capable of processing petabytes of data while ensuring speed, accuracy, and reliability.
We’ll explore how microservices, event-driven design, and container orchestration enable modularity, resilience, and elastic scalability for AI-driven ecosystems. Attendees will learn strategies for integrating real-time and batch data pipelines, leveraging technologies like Kafka, BigQuery, and vector databases to feed AI agents with up-to-the-moment, context-rich information.
Performance optimization techniques, including predictive scaling, geographic load balancing, and intelligent caching, will be highlighted for maintaining sub-second agent response times during peak loads. Security and compliance are built into every layer, with Zero Trust IAM, privacy-by-design principles, and runtime protections ensuring trust and regulatory adherence.
We’ll also cover emerging trends such as multi-agent orchestration, edge AI for localized decision-making, and federated learning for privacy-preserving model training across distributed environments.
Whether you’re an AI engineer, cloud architect, or product leader, you’ll leave with a practical framework to deploy, scale, and secure AI agents delivering high-performance, personalized engagement in a competitive, data-driven world.
Prasenjeet Madare is a seasoned technology and program management professional with over 16 years of experience delivering enterprise-grade solutions in SaaS, marketing automation, and digital transformation across leading global organizations. Currently serving as a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, Prasenjeet leads transformative marketing technology initiatives that empower internal business groups to engage customers at scale with precision and efficiency. He architects and drives platform modernization, campaign performance reporting, and data integration projects, collaborating closely with engineering, business, and design teams. His leadership in implementing Microsoft’s global campaign dashboard has streamlined cross-sell and upsell strategies, providing accurate, low-latency insights while onboarding multiple business units to a unified analytics framework. Prior to joining Microsoft, Prasenjeet spent over eight years at Adobe as a Senior Technical Consultant, where he spearheaded marketing automation implementations for more than 30 Fortune 100 clients using Adobe Experience Cloud. His contributions ranged from architecting end-to-end Adobe Campaign solutions including data modeling, API integration, and multi-channel campaign deployment to developing personalized offer systems that reached millions daily. He led data migration to AWS-hosted infrastructures, established scalable ETL pipelines, and was instrumental in improving client engagement, retention, and marketing ROI. Recognized with Adobe’s Sales Achievement Award (2015–2020), Customer Turnaround Award, and the "Go-To-Guy" Award, he exemplified customer-centric innovation and delivery excellence. Earlier in his career, Prasenjeet worked with Siemens PLM Software as a Project Engineer, where he implemented MES quality software for leading automotive clients, ensuring near-perfect production quality with 99.99% accuracy. He also contributed to software engineering projects at RSA Security, Hexaware Technologies, and Alliance Bernstein, building automation tools, optimizing SQL-based systems, and supporting mission-critical middleware using Microsoft BizTalk and Oracle platforms. Prasenjeet holds a Master’s in Information Systems from Northeastern University and a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University of Mumbai. He is certified as a Scrum Master, Scrum Product Owner, Oracle Associate, and has completed coursework in Generative AI applications from MIT. With deep expertise across marketing technology stacks, campaign analytics, data engineering, and agile delivery, Prasenjeet excels at aligning business strategy with scalable technical solutions. His career reflects a passion for innovation, stakeholder collaboration, and driving measurable impact through thoughtful leadership and emerging technologies.