A full day learning from brilliant developers building real world products.

We'll choose our speakers based on their experience building real world applications and their ability to share their knowledge.

On Thursday afternoon, July 17th, we have two workshops, ticketed seperately from the main conference, which anyone can attend. In the evening we'll have an informal gathering where speakers, attendees and locals can meet up and chat.

  1. Anne T. Griffin

    Workshop: Building Successful Products with AI

    In an era where everyone's rushing to let AI drive their product decisions, learn how to use AI as an amplifier of your super powers, while keeping your product intuition sharp and your customer connection stronger than ever.

    Exact Location TBD - Downtown Asheville

    - EST

  2. Brent Laster

    Workshop: Advanced features in GitHub Copilot Hands-on

    GitHub Copilot is arguably the most popular AI-driven coding assistant. It is available for many development environments and also integrated into GitHub itself.

    Exact Location TBD - Downtown Asheville

    - EST

  3. Informal Welcoming Meetup

    Happy Hour at Bear's BBQ

    First beverage on us! Other beverages and food available for purchase.

    Bear's BBQ @ 135 Coxe Ave. Asheville, NC

    - EST

On Friday, July 18th, we have a full day of talks from developers building real world applications with AI. Followed by a closing happy hour sponsored by Digits.

  1. Registration, coffee, and light snacks

    - EST

  2. Opening Remarks

    - EST

  3. Uma Uppin

    Opportunities for Startups Leveraging AI in 2025

    AI’s fast-paced industry changes is creating chances for entrepreneurs and startups. We’ll examine how AI is used, focusing on real-world applications in customer success and personalization that boost revenue. This talk shows you how to use AI in building successful and scalable businesses.

    - EST

  4. Anne T. Griffin

    Avoiding the Chatbot Trap: Designing AI Interfaces That Unlock Real Business and Customer Value

    The AI chatbot has become the corporate checkbox solution: a quick way to signal “we’re doing AI” while often delivering suboptimal value. As a product leader who has implemented AI across multiple contexts, I will share a strategic framework for matching AI capabilities to appropriate interfaces.

    - EST

  5. David Hawthorne

    Navigating the New AI Security Landscape: OWASP Top 10 for LLMs

    LLMs inherit familiar web-era risks with new names. This session maps OWASP’s Top 10 for LLMs, offering practical security insights for a general audience. Gain a strategic lens on the intersection of cybersecurity and AI—and walk away better equipped to protect your systems, data, and products.

    - EST

  6. Break

    - EST

  7. Vijay Chakilam

    Building Safe, Creative AI Experiences for Kids: Real-World Lessons from Kooper AI

    How do you build AI that sparks creativity while staying safe and aligned? Drawing on our experience with a real-world AI product built for the most imaginative — and unpredictable — users: kids, I’ll share practical techniques for prompt design, content filtering, and feedback loops that apply to human-centered AI products.

    - EST

  8. Brent Laster

    Incorporating AI into your SDLC: Leveraging AI tooling across the phases of your software development lifecycle

    Many devs know how to use AI assistants when they are coding. But coding is only one part of the SDLC. AI tools and assistants can play key roles and bring a lot of value-add to other phases such as planning, documenting, maintenance, and more! In this talk we’ll cover key and easy ways to do this.

    - EST

  9. Lunch

    There are lots of great places within walking distance

    - EST

  10. Shon Urbas

    Can AI Build Your Next API Integration? Lessons from Pandium’s Experimentation with LLMs.

    Building API integrations has traditionally been a time-consuming process, requiring developers to manually define business logic, authentication flows, and data transformations. But what if an AI-powered system could take a structured prompt and generate a functional integration in minutes?

    - EST

  11. Don Shin

    Empowering Your Product with Agentic AI: What Product Leaders Need to Know About Model Context Protocol (MCP)

    Learn how Model Context Protocol (MCP) helps product leaders unlock smarter, more context-aware AI features. This session covers how MCP enables Agentic AI to interface with your existing systems—driving real business value without overhauling your tech stack.

    - EST

  12. Hannes Hapke

    The Hard Truth About AI Agents: Lessons Learned from Running Agents in Production

    AI Agents dazzle in demos but can be hard in production. Learn from Digits’ real-world implementation challenges, architectural solutions, and monitoring systems. Get practical insights to deploy your own agents successfully without falling into the same pitfalls we overcame.

    - EST

  13. Break

    - EST

  14. Drishti Jain

    Beyond the Vector DB: Building a RAG Stack That Actually Stays Fresh

    Vector search is just the start. In this talk, I share how I built a RAG system that keeps internal knowledge fresh with weekly refresh pipelines, embedding versioning, and change tracking. Learn how to avoid stale retrieval and handle drift in production.

    - EST

  15. Ryan Stevens

    From Noisy Alerts to Smart Fixes: AI in Incident Response

    On-call disasters; alarms blare, you’re lost in logs. The fix? Trivial. The stress? Not. At scale, noisy alerts and simple fixes waste time. AI parses logs, pinpoints issues, and suggests fixes. Let’s talk about the system we’ve built, and more importantly, the lessons we’ve learned by building it.

    - EST

  16. After Party sponsored by Digits

    VOWL Happy Hour

    At VOWL/DSSOLVR (a short walk from the venue). First beverage on us!

    VOWL/DSSOLVR @ 63 N Lexington Ave., Asheville, NC 28801

    - EST