GenAI Superstream: Everyday AI Agents

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction – Claire Vo (5 minutes)

• Claire welcomes you to the GenAI Superstream.

Fireside Chat: Agents and the Future of Work – Claire Vo and Kathy Pham (30 minutes)

• Opening the conference, ChatPRD’s founder and CEO, Claire Vo, and Harvard faculty member and Workday’s VP of AI, Kathy Pham, will peel back the layers of hype surrounding AI agents while addressing the real concerns and misconceptions that keep people from moving beyond basic chatbots. You’ll hear how AI agents are already changing workflows across industries, why building them is more straightforward than most people think, and what mindsets separate the fast-moving early adopters from those who are standing still. Along the way, Claire and Kathy share examples from their own work and explain why now is the moment to shift from chatbot conversations to collaboration with AI agents.

Agents Demystified: Real Patterns for Real Work – Jacob Bank (30 minutes)

• Jacob Bank, founder and CEO of Relay.app, provides a jargon- and hype-free definition of AI agents that anyone can understand. You’ll learn how agents differ from chatbots and copilots, and why the agents-versus-workflows debate often misses the point. He also shares four powerful agent patterns to automate internal operations, monitor the outside world, prepare for key events, and run ongoing analysis. Drawing on his experience using agents to run Relay.app, Jacob shows you how agents can quietly but powerfully reduce manual overhead and help you work smarter. You’ll come away with a clear understanding of AI agents and concrete ideas for where they can help in your work.

Break (5 mins)

Think Like a Programmer to Build Better Agents — David Griffiths (30 minutes)

• You don't need to code to create AI agents; but thinking like a programmer can make your agents smarter and more adaptable. Instead of building rigid step-by-step workflows, software developer and author David Griffiths shows you how a few critical concepts can help you design agents that adjust on the fly and solve unexpected problems. By borrowing principles from programming—modularity, abstraction, and separation of goals from methods— you can build agents that handle complex, real-world challenges with flexibility.

Unlocking AI Agents for Everyday Productivity in Microsoft 365 – April Dunnam (30 minutes)

• Microsoft principal cloud advocate April Dunnam shows you how to build agents in Microsoft 365 and Copilot Studio that handle the busywork, so you can focus on more creative, high-value work. Through live demonstrations and practical examples, you’ll see how agents can pull from your organizational data to generate quick insights, trends, or performance summaries; scan documents, notes, and knowledge bases to answer questions and compile findings; consolidate project updates across tools into easy-to-share summaries for MBRs or team check-ins; and guide new hires with company FAQs or help employees troubleshoot common tech issues.

Break (5 minutes)

Stop the Drift: Using AI Agents to Evolve and Enforce Design Systems – Nadia Elinbabi (30 minutes)

• Design systems are the shared libraries of UI components, patterns, and guidelines that keep products visually consistent. But without strong governance, systems drift, teams revert to old patterns, inconsistencies creep back in, and the result is design debt that compounds with every sprint. Nadia Elinbabi, senior manager of product at Lowe’s, demonstrates how you can create AI agents to serve as governance copilots for design systems, protecting that investment and ensuring the system remains a living asset. You’ll see how agents can audit portfolios and quantify drift, flag where inconsistencies introduce usability risks and delays in delivery, suggest which components should be upgraded, and answer designer questions about system rules in plain language. By the end, you’ll understand how governance agents go beyond compliance to actively evolve design systems.

Building Your Personal AI Product Management Operating System – Aman Khan (30 minutes)

• What if AI could be your product partner instead of just an assistant? Imagine building a personal operating system that could tell you which tasks on your backlog to tackle first, draft PRDs while you’re in meetings, and remember exactly how you like to structure your product specs. Aman Khan, product leader at Arize AI, demonstrates a simple, customizable AI system that goes beyond single prompts to actually manage your PM workflow. You’ll leave with a practical blueprint for building agents that handle the operational overhead of product management, all running on your own machine (with some help from LLMs) and under your control. You’ll also pick up best practices around managing context, working with agents, and focusing on outcomes instead of technology.

From Individual Agents to Multi-Agent Enterprise Ecosystems – Babak Hodjat (30 minutes)

• While individual AI agents are transforming personal productivity, the next frontier emerges when these autonomous teammates multiply across organizations. In this forward-looking session, Babak Hodjat, CTO of Cognizant, bridges the gap between the individual agent strategies you know today and the enterprise-wide AI ecosystems of tomorrow. He explores how the same principles that make personal AI agents effective—task specialization, autonomous decision-making, and workflow automation—scale to create interconnected systems where dozens of AI agents collaborate, compete, and coordinate to multiply organizational impact. You’ll discover how enterprises are moving beyond single-agent productivity gains to orchestrate multi-agent systems that can autonomously manage cross-departmental workflows and handle complex operations spanning multiple domains. He also demonstrates practical approaches to evolving from individual AI teammates to enterprise AI ecosystems, including live prototyping of multi-agent collaboration using open source tools.

Closing Remarks – Claire Vo (5 minutes)

• Claire closes out today’s event.