AI agents can only be truly autonomous if they have the authority to act and that authority is tightly controlled. At ODSC AI West 2026, @ianlivingstone, Co-Founder & CEO of @KeycardAI, will present “Autonomy Requires Authority: Building Auth for AI Agents.” Ian brings 15+ years of experience across developer tools, security infrastructure, and platform engineering, including previous roles at Snyk and Salesforce. At Keycard, his work focuses on trusted, autonomous agents and the infrastructure needed to let them access tools and services safely. In this session, he’ll explore the shift from static credentials and inherited permissions toward ephemeral access, delegated authority, runtime context, and attributable agent actions. Join Ian at ODSC AI West 2026:

Using the biggest model for every task can work in a demo. In production, cost, latency, and task-specific quality can tell a different story. At ODSC AI West 2026, Rob Ferguson, VP of Technology and Strategy at @FireworksAI_HQ, will present “One Big Model, or Many Small Ones?” Rob will make the case for a different architecture: fine-tuning smaller, task-specific models and coordinating them through routing and evaluation layers. Drawing on experience across Fireworks, Microsoft, and AWS, he’ll explore how teams can identify good candidates for specialized models, build eval sets around their actual workloads, estimate costs more realistically, and route requests to the right model instead of defaulting to one generalist system. Join Rob at ODSC AI West 2026:

Better models do not eliminate the need for good agent design. At ODSC AI West 2026, @rajistics, Agentic AI Engineer at @OpenHandsDev, will lead the training “The Design of Coding Agents: A Hands-On Workshop on Harness Engineering.” Rajiv will break down four core harness levers that shape coding-agent performance: retrieval, memory, loops, and architecture. Attendees will test these ideas live using the open-source OpenHands harness and see how different design choices affect agent behavior. With experience across OpenHands, Contextual AI, Hugging Face, Snorkel, Snowflake, and DataRobot, Rajiv brings a practical view of what it takes to build coding agents that work beyond a demo. 👉 Join this AI for Software Developers training at ODSC AI West 2026: