Live event

Software Architecture Superstream: Enterprise Architecture in the Age of AI

Navigating the future of systems and processes

Sponsored by

Logos: Canonical Microsoft Intel
Event description What you’ll learn Schedule

Event description

Understanding how AI is reshaping enterprise architecture is now essential to your success as a technology leader, but navigating the impact of AI on systems, processes, and governance can be overwhelming. From data readiness to infrastructure changes, and from ethical concerns to automation trends, AI is transforming how organizations design, build, and evolve their architectures.

Join us to explore the strategies, components, and design principles that modern enterprise architects must employ to keep up with these dynamics. You’ll hear expert insights into building adaptive, AI-ready architectures that support continuous innovation, ensure governance and security, and align seamlessly with business goals—so you can lead confidently in the age of AI.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Understand how AI is transforming the role of enterprise architects and how you can be prepared to evolve
  • Explore how enterprise architects and technology leaders can reimagine value streams as living, event-driven systems
  • Grasp how AI workflows fit into enterprise architectures and what that means for architects

Schedule

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

Introduction – Neal Ford (5 minutes)

  • Neal Ford welcomes you to the Software Architecture Superstream.

Keynote: Quantifying Enterprise Architecture: Architecture as Code – Neal Ford (40 minutes)

  • Join Thoughtwork’s director Neal Ford to understand how to redefine architecture as code, creating feedback for changes in your architecture. Learn how expressing architecture through source code enables expressing nine different intersections with architecture and other parts of the software development ecosystem: engineering, teams, generative AI, business, and more. Neal will explore how fitness functions, generative AI, and MCP lead to new capabilities that architects can leverage to create fast feedback and mitigate the inevitable negative consequences for important choices.

Break (5 minutes)

From Value Streams to Agentic Value Streams – Anjali Jain and Philip O’Shaughnessy (40 minutes)

  • Traditional business architecture frameworks like TOGAF and SAFe struggle with the speed of agentic AI. Metro Bank’s data governance lead, Anjali Jain, and head of architecture, Philip O’Shaughnessy, explore how autonomous agents transform business value streams and customer journeys, introducing new architectural patterns: agent as a capability, adaptive value streams, decision escalation paths, agent mesh, and policy as code. Discover how enterprise architects and technology leaders can reimagine value streams as living, event-driven systems with built-in governance.

Scaling AI with Open Source Tools in the Public Cloud – Brian Rogers and Ron Abellera (Sponsored by Canonical) (30 minutes)

  • Modern AI demands modern infrastructure—but scaling effectively comes with challenges. From high up-front hardware costs to the need for sensitive data during testing, building AI systems can quickly become complex and expensive. As AI workloads grow, compute resources are consumed dynamically and unpredictably, often leading to inefficiencies and vendor lock-in. In this talk, Brian Rogers, a solutions architect at Intel, and Ron Abellera, a Global Black Belt at Microsoft, explore how to design optimized AI infrastructure using open source tools on top of Ubuntu Pro and Azure public cloud platforms with Intel-powered solutions. You’ll learn key trade-offs to consider, how to balance cost and performance, and strategies for avoiding common pitfalls. Whether you’re an architect or a manager, this session will help you make smarter decisions when deploying AI at scale.
  • This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Brian and Ron.

Break (5 minutes)

Agent-Oriented Architecture: Reimagining Enterprise Systems for an AI-Native Future – Lewis Crawford (40 minutes)

  • We’re at a fascinating inflection point in enterprise software evolution. Organizations are successfully deploying AI to augment human workflows: developers code faster with Cursor, analysts process data more efficiently with Claude, customer service scales with chatbots. This approach is delivering real value and represents a sensible starting point for AI adoption. But what comes next? What does it mean to build AI-native workflows—not human workflows with AI augmentation, but AI workflows with human augmentation? Join Lewis Crawford, AI strategy lead at Equal Experts, to understand how this leads us to agent-oriented architecture (AOA)—a fundamental reimagining of how enterprise systems should be designed, built, and operated when AI agents become first-class citizens. This isn’t about abandoning current strategies; it’s about preparing for what’s coming.

You Can Just Ship Agents: Architecting for the Agentic Era – Dom Sipowicz (40 minutes)

  • Enterprises are moving fast from AI prototypes to production-ready agent systems. Solutions architect Dom Sipowicz explores how modern teams are building reliable, long-running, and observable agents without reinventing orchestration. Using the Vercel AI Cloud and the new Workflow Development Kit, Dom shows you how durability, retries, and human-in-the-loop approvals become first-class features of your architecture. Learn how these patterns make it possible to design, prototype, and scale agents with the same ease as any modern web application.

Closing Remarks – Neal Ford (5 minutes)

  • Neal Ford closes out today’s event.