Cloud Built for AI. Logic at the Edge.

Lena Hall

Senior Director of Developers and AI,

Akamai

The Signal Layer: What to Build When Anything Can Be Built

AI has made implementation faster, cheaper, and more widely available. That changes the real bottleneck in software.

Every team can generate code and spin up agents. The advantage moves to a different layer: knowing what is worth building, who it is for, how people will discover it, and how the product should behave once they do.

This keynote introduces the system of public signal, user intent, agent experience, distribution loops, and product judgment that helps builders decide what deserves to exist before they commit time, infrastructure, and trust to building it.

We will look at how AI changes the software lifecycle from “can we build it?” to “should this exist? When anything can be built, the most valuable builders are the ones who can read signal early and shape the right experience.

Thursday 9 July | 12:10 PM - 12:40 PM | Main Stage

Agents That Own Their Inference: Building Production AI Agents on Dedicated GPUs

Every production agent today is renting its intelligence. You're paying per token, sending your customer's data to someone else's servers, and hoping the provider doesn't rate-limit you during your launch. For most teams, that's fine. But for a growing number of teams in regulated industries, with high-volume products, latency-sensitive workloads, or rising token bills, it's starting to look like a liability.

In this 120-minute hands-on workshop you'll get a dedicated GPU and build an agent that runs on infrastructure you control. You'll stand up vLLM, point your agent at it, and drive concurrent load through the stack until you can see batching, KV cache pressure, and throughput limits in the metrics. Then you'll optimize the deployment to improve throughput while keeping per-request latency in line.

The focus isn't agent frameworks. It's the inference layer underneath them. You'll leave with working code and a real understanding of continuous batching under real concurrency, KV cache tradeoffs, vLLM's metrics, and the bottlenecks that only show up when you operate the inference server yourself.

Friday 10 July |  2:45 PM -  4:45 PM | Room M1

Du'An Lightfoot

Senior Developer Advocate,

Akamai

The Agent Interface Layer: Protocols, Tools and Trust Boundaries

For agents to be useful, they have to connect to tools, data and systems - and a new layer is forming to make that possible. The people building that layer come together to ask how agents should meet the real world, and where the boundaries belong. A look at what is taking shape and what is still wide open.

Moderated by Du'An Lightfoot, Senior Developer Advocate, Akamai

Panel speakers

• Taroon Mandhana, CTO AI and Teamwork of Atlassian
• Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel
• David Soria Parra, Co-creator of MCP, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic

Thursday 9 July |  3:30 PM -  4:00 PM | Main Stage