Who Books This Speaker

The organizers booking an agentic AI speaker fall into a small set of buyer profiles. Knowing the profile helps both sides shape the right talk.

• Conference programmers for focused AI summits: AI Agent Conference, Interrupt, AI Engineer Summit, RAG and Reasoning summits, AAAI workshops. They want a 30 to 45 minute deep technical session, not a 60 minute introduction
• Internal engineering event organizers at large companies: a senior platform team running a half-day or full-day internal AI summit, looking for an outside practitioner to anchor the morning
• Corporate event managers for product launches or customer events: looking for a credible practitioner to land a keynote that makes engineering buyers in the room trust the platform message
• Developer relations leads at AI infrastructure companies: orchestration frameworks, eval platforms, observability vendors. They want a customer-credible voice on stage at their user conference
• VPs of Engineering hosting an offsite or strategy day: looking for a fireside or a private session that pressure-tests their internal agent roadmap
• Academic workshop organizers: ICLR, ICSE, AAAI affiliated events where the room wants a connection from research to production

Talk Topics That Land

The talks below have all been requested or delivered. Each is calibrated for a technical audience that has built or operated at least a prototype agent and wants the next layer.

• Architecture decisions that determine agent quality at scale: single-agent vs supervisor vs swarm, the irreducible tradeoffs between parallelism and coherence, why most production wins come from simpler topologies
• Failure modes specific to multi-agent systems: context fragmentation, planning drift, sub-agent incoherence, the 15x token cost documented by Anthropic, the Cognition Labs argument against multi-agent for coding
• Evaluation patterns for autonomous behavior: trajectory evals vs output evals, golden trajectory regression sets, LLM-as-judge calibration, when to use Braintrust vs Langfuse vs LangSmith vs Arize Phoenix
• Cost and latency design at agent granularity: token budgets, step caps, prompt caching, model routing across GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.7 and open weights, where the 80 percent cost reductions actually come from
• Tool design and MCP: how the Model Context Protocol changed the tool-building economics, what makes a tool surface debuggable, the 30-tool ceiling on agent selection accuracy
• Memory architecture: short-term vs episodic vs semantic vs procedural, when to reach for Letta or Mem0 or Zep or LangMem, why most production agents stay closer to a structured scratchpad than a vector store
• What two years of running agents in production has actually taught us: the gap between demo and ship, the bugs the demos hide, the eval debt that compounds invisibly
• When NOT to use an agent: the larger half of agent practice is recognizing when a workflow, router, or single LLM call is the correct answer and saying so out loud
• The agentic engineering organization: hiring, on-call, postmortems, observability stack, governance for non-deterministic systems in regulated environments

Formats Offered

The right format depends on audience size, room shape, and what the organizer wants the audience to leave with.

• Keynote (30 to 45 minutes): one main argument with three to five concrete examples, designed for a plenary room, slides that work projected on a 20 meter screen, finishes with a memorable claim
• Deep-dive technical session (45 to 60 minutes): more detail, more code-level examples, often paired with Q&A. The default for AI engineering conferences and focused summits
• Fireside chat or moderated interview (30 to 45 minutes): more conversational, less slide-driven, anchored by a strong moderator. Works well at executive summits and customer events
• Panel (45 to 60 minutes): the practitioner role is to push back on hype-cycle claims and ground the room in operating reality. Often paired with a researcher and a vendor
• Hands-on workshop (half day to two days): for engineering teams who need to build muscle, not just hear arguments. See the LLM workshop format for the curriculum
• Private executive session (60 to 90 minutes): off-the-record, leadership team of one company, often run as a roadmap review with a technical guest. Higher density than a keynote
• Multi-talk residency: keynote plus workshop plus office hours over one or two days, common at customer conferences and internal company summits

What the Audience Gets

A useful talk leaves the audience with at least one decision they will make differently on Monday. The structure below is the contract.

• A defensible mental model of the design space: orchestration topologies, memory layouts, evaluation patterns, all named and bounded
• A short list of decisions to make differently in their own systems, with the tradeoffs surfaced explicitly
• Concrete numbers: token costs, latency budgets, eval scores, real production failure rates. Not "be careful with cost" but specific multiples
• A pointer set: papers worth reading, frameworks worth trying, observability tools worth installing. Always vendor-neutral
• A debugging vocabulary: names for failure modes so the team can talk about them out loud (context rot, planning drift, sub-agent incoherence, irrecoverable side effects)
• A clear no-go list: when not to use an agent, when not to add another sub-agent, when not to switch frameworks

Past and Recurring Talk Themes

The talks evolve with the field. The themes below recur because they keep being the most-requested at agentic events.

• Agentic Architecture: composing language models, tools, memory, and control flow into goal-seeking systems that survive contact with production
• Building Effective Agents: the workflow vs agent distinction from Anthropic, applied to real engineering choices
• Why Most Multi-Agent Systems Should Be Single-Agent Systems: the Cognition Labs argument extended with production examples
• The MCP Inflection Point: how the Model Context Protocol reshapes tool design across Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and IDEs
• Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Systems: trajectory evals, LLM-as-judge calibration, eval debt management
• Cost Shapes at Agent Granularity: token accounting, prompt caching, model routing, the 80 percent reduction case studies
• What Two Years of Running Agents in Production Has Taught Us: a survey talk that grows each year
• The Practitioner Pushback on AI ROI Claims: why most ROI numbers presented to boards do not survive finance review

Logistics, Fees, and Lead Time

The 2026 keynote market has hardened. Technical practitioners with production credibility and a public track record cluster in a specific range. The numbers below reflect the realistic shape for AI and tech speakers at the practitioner tier, not futurist headliners.

• Fee range (US, technology and AI practitioner tier): $10,000 to $30,000 for a single keynote or deep-dive session, with the upper end for keynotes that include custom content, live demos, or multi-talk residencies
• Customization premium: 15 to 25 percent added when the organizer requests a deeply tailored deck for a specific audience or product context
• AV and live-demo requirements: live agent demos need dedicated bandwidth, a backup screen capture, and a backup model endpoint. Organizer typically covers this AV layer
• Workshop fee structure: separate, day-rate-based for hands-on sessions. See the LLM workshop entry for the workshop-specific shape
• Travel: standard pass-through (business-class flights for international, hotel, ground transport). Often waived for nearby events
• Virtual delivery: available for any keynote or workshop, typically priced 30 to 50 percent below in-person, with the same prep depth
• Lead time: 8 to 16 weeks is comfortable for a customized keynote. 4 to 8 weeks is workable if the topic is one already in the recurring set. Under 4 weeks is possible only if the topic is fully off-the-shelf
• Recording rights: standard organizer recording rights granted; perpetual marketing use of the recording typically negotiated separately

Who This Speaker Is Right For (And Who It Is Not)

Not every event needs a practitioner speaker. Calibrating fit saves the organizer money and the audience attention.

• Right fit: engineering audiences, AI summits, developer conferences, AI infrastructure user conferences, internal company AI events, executive offsites with strong technical content, academic workshops on agentic engineering
• Right fit: organizers who want the audience challenged, not just entertained. Audiences who will recognize when a claim is real
• Right fit: events with at least 60 minutes of technical content per talk and a Q&A culture
• Wrong fit: general business audiences without engineering depth. They need a different speaker
• Wrong fit: pure futurist or motivational events. The talks are operating-engineer talks, not horizon-scanning talks
• Wrong fit: events where the speaker brief is a vendor pitch in disguise. The talks are vendor-neutral; vendor logos appear only as examples, not as endorsements

How to Brief the Speaker

The single biggest determinant of a great talk is the brief. The structure below is what the speaker actually reads when preparing.

• Audience profile: rough sizes by role (engineers, EMs, PMs, executives), seniority distribution, what they have already built
• Outcome the organizer wants: what should the audience think, decide, or do differently after the talk
• Three specific topics that will resonate, three to avoid: usually because they have been overdone at past events or do not match the audience level
• Adjacent talks on the agenda: avoid duplication, find handoffs to other sessions
• Slot context: morning keynote vs after-lunch session vs closing talk. Energy budget on stage differs for each
• Any logos, brand voice, or messaging guardrails for sponsor talks. Stated explicitly so the talk does not drift into compliance territory mid-stage
• Recording and distribution plan: where the talk will live afterward, whether clips will be cut, how the speaker should sign off

How to Book

Booking is one short call: topic, format, date, audience, fee. The decision usually closes in 10 days for events more than 6 weeks out.

• Step 1: send a one-page brief covering audience, date, format, and topic preferences
• Step 2: 30 minute call to align on the talk concept and confirm the slot
• Step 3: contract issued within 5 business days. Fee, scope, AV requirements, recording rights, cancellation terms
• Step 4: prep cadence. One kick-off, one mid-prep alignment, one tech-check the day before the event
• Step 5: deliver. On stage, recorded, and available for follow-up Q&A by attendees through the organizer channel

FAQ