AI Startup Spotlight
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Inside the companies defining AI’s next wave
October's AI Startup Spotlight turns to a critical challenge in enterprise AI: how to ensure voice agents perform reliably in the real world. Coval helps teams replace slow, manual testing with automated simulation and observability, enabling them to evaluate conversational AI agents at scale, identify issues early, and deploy with greater confidence. Join Gabriela de Queiroz and Coval founder Brooke Hopkins to learn what it takes to build, test, and scale production-ready voice AI agents, and explore the engineering decisions shaping the next generation of conversational experiences.
Join us each month for AI Startup Spotlight, a live interview series hosted by Gabriela de Queiroz, featuring founders building innovative AI startups. Each episode goes beyond the product demo to explore the technology behind the product, the engineering decisions that shaped it, and the lessons learned along the way, giving developers, technical leaders, and AI builders practical insights into creating AI products.
From autonomous agents and foundation models to developer tools, enterprise AI, and emerging infrastructure, you’ll hear firsthand how today’s most promising AI companies are solving real-world problems and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Drawing on her experience as an AI leader and deep connections across the technology community, Gabriela leads candid conversations that uncover the ideas, challenges, and breakthroughs driving AI’s next wave.
Whether you’re building with AI, evaluating emerging technologies, or looking for inspiration from the people creating tomorrow’s AI companies, AI Startup Spotlight offers a front-row seat to the founders, technologies, and engineering stories shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Bring your questions and join the conversation.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Discover emerging AI startups and technologies before they become mainstream, and understand the problems they’re built to solve
- See the technology in action through live demos that go beyond the pitch to show how products work in real-world scenarios
- Evaluate what’s worth watching by exploring each startup’s approach, use cases, differentiators, and potential impact on the AI ecosystem
This live event is for you because...
- You want to stay ahead of the AI landscape and discover promising companies, products, and technologies as they emerge.
- You’re evaluating AI for your organization and want practical insight into new solutions and where they might fit.
- You’re a developer, technical leader, or decision-maker looking for a fast way to understand what’s next in AI and why it matters.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
October 1, November 5, December 3, 2026 7:00am PT / 10:00am ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (30 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Gabriela de Queiroz
Gabriela de Queiroz is an AI and startup advisor and a former director of AI at Microsoft. She partners with companies to identify where AI can create meaningful value and turn those opportunities into products, programs, and experiences people actually use.
Previously, Gabriela held senior leadership roles at IBM, including chief data scientist, and earlier in her career worked as a lead data scientist at three startups that were later acquired. Her experience spans healthcare, advertising, finance, and technology. She is also the founder of R-Ladies and AI Inclusive, two global organizations advancing diversity in data science and AI.
Brooke Hopkins
Brooke Hopkins is the founder and CEO of Coval, the evaluation platform for enterprise voice AI. She started her career building voice technology at Google Assistant, before going on to lead the evaluation infrastructure team at Waymo, where she coded the first versions of the dataset storage and foundational simulation systems, and her team built the developer tools for launching and running evals at scale. It was there that she identified the parallel that became Coval: self-driving systems and conversational AI face the same challenges.
With Coval, Brooke is helping cross-functional teams replace slow, manual testing with automated simulation and observability for conversational AI agents, expanding test coverage, accelerating development, and enabling agents to be deployed with confidence in real production environments. She has collaborated with hundreds of voice systems across industries, giving the Coval team unique insight into the cutting edge of voice AI capabilities and where things go wrong.