Save The Date

 

AI and Software Engineering

 

September 24, 2026

 

AI is transforming how software is designed, built, and delivered. Yet many organizations are still navigating how to move from experimentation to effective, scalable implementation. This half-day virtual conference is designed to help engineering leaders, architects, product managers, and technical professionals understand what it really takes to adopt AI across the software development lifecycle.

What You’ll Learn

  • AI strategy and organizational readiness:How to align AI initiatives with business goals, governance practices, and measurable value.

  • Adopting AI-first Software Development: What are the essential leadership practices, cultural shifts, and engineering foundations required to successfully transition to AI-first software development and achieve significant productivity gains

  • Patterns for utilizing AI in Software Development: Practical approaches to utilizing AI in Software Engineering including Spec Driven Development.

  • Frameworks for turning AI ideas into reality: How to create a structured, repeatable pipeline that moves innovation from inspiration to measurable outcomes.

This event is ideal for engineering managers, technical leads, solution architects, DevOps leaders, product owners, and anyone navigating AI’s rapid evolution in complex business environments.

Topics
Keith Henning
Director of Enterprise Architecture | Dollar General

From Hype to Scale: Operationalizing AI in Retail Enterprises

Artificial intelligence is reshaping retail at every layer of the enterprise, from merchandising and supply chain optimization to customer experience and workforce productivity. Yet many organizations struggle to move beyond isolated pilots and disconnected proofs of concept.

In this session, Keith Henning explores the realities of enterprise AI adoption inside large retail environments, focusing on the organizational, architectural, and operational changes required to successfully scale AI initiatives. Drawing from real-world experience leading enterprise technology strategy, Keith will discuss how retailers can align AI investments with measurable business outcomes while navigating governance, legacy systems, data complexity, and organizational resistance.

Attendees will gain practical insights into building AI-ready platforms, enabling cross-functional adoption, identifying high-value use cases, and creating sustainable innovation models that move beyond experimentation into enterprise-wide transformation.

Dabis Camero
CEO & Co-Founder, Sapiencia.AI | AI & Cybersecurity Executive

From Exposed to Protected: Securing Enterprise LLM Applications with SapienShield AI Firewall

A 30-minute practitioner session for AI in Software Engineering (SoftEd), September 24, 2026 — walking engineering leaders through real AI threat scenarios and demonstrating how a firewall architecture addresses each risk without rebuilding existing application stacks.

Shannon McGarity and Elizabeth Zietlow "EZ"
Co-Founders | Hover Media LLC

AI hasn't killed authenticity (yet) - but it's thrown the definition up for grabs.

In a world where anyone can generate anything in seconds, the question isn't whether you used AI. It's whether you still showed up. Shannon McGarity and Elizabeth Zietlow of Hover Media, bring a practitioner's lens to the messiest question in AI-augmented work right now: how do you stay you — in your outputs, your brand, and your working relationships — when the tools can do so much of the heavy lifting? Drawing on their own experiments, missteps, and hard-won working principles, they'll explore what authenticity actually means when the AI badge lands on work you spent nine months thinking about, why your personal values around AI use matter as much as the brand you work for and how articulating your own "AI Credo" — your "this is how I show up" — might be the most underrated professional move of the moment.

Philip Heijkoop
Global Practice Lead – Developer Experience

Overview of Strategies for Managing OpEx for Individual and Workflow AI Usage with Open Weight Models

This session will walk through several real-world examples of replacing OpenAI/Anthropic model usage with open weight-based models to help stabilize cost profiles, improve usage predictability, and strengthen data access controls.

Sunita Mccoy | Dev Panajkar
Global Engineering Executive | CIO, XClaymation

99% Confidence, 100% Wrong When AI gets bold, QA gets busy.

Artificial intelligence was supposed to make life easier. Faster answers, smarter tools, fewer mistakes. Then it showed up to work with the confidence of a senior architect, the accuracy of a broken autocomplete, and the emotional stability of a production server on release day.

This session is a hilarious look at the strange new partnership between QA engineers and AI: one confidently generates answers, the other quietly asks, “Did anyone actually test this?”. From hallucinated features to mysteriously “passing” test cases, 99% Confidence, 100% Wrong; celebrates the people who live in the edge cases, break the happy path, and remind everyone that “it worked in the demo” is not a quality strategy.

For every AI that says, “I’m sure,” there’s a QA engineer opening a defect ticket.

Lineup of Speakers


More to come soon
K.Heanning
Keith Henning
Enterprise Architect | Dollar General

Keith Henning is a technology executive, author, educator, and speaker with more than 30 years of experience in enterprise technology and software engineering leadership. He currently serves as Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dollar General and is also an Instructional Associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Keith holds a Master of Science in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence from Georgia Tech and a law degree from the University of Arkansas. He regularly speaks on AI, system design, and engineering leadership.

D.Camero
Dabis Camero
CEO & Co-Founder, Sapiencia.AI | AI & Cybersecurity Executive

Dabis Camero is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sapiencia.AI, where he leads R&D strategy at the intersection of artificial intelligence and enterprise cybersecurity. With over 25 years of experience spanning AI/ML engineering, identity and access management, systems architecture, and academic instruction, Dabis brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and executive leadership to every engagement.

J.E.Martis
Jason Elroy Martis, PhD
Academic Leader | Associate Professor, NMAMIT | Director – India Operations, Sapiencia.AI | AI, Deep Learning & Cybersecurity Enthusiast

I am an Associate Professor in Information Science & Engineering at NMAMIT and currently serve as Director – India Operations at Sapiencia.AI, where I work at the intersection of academia, artificial intelligence, and real-world technology innovation.My professional interests revolve around Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and AI-driven Cybersecurity, with a strong focus on building practical, scalable, and impactful solutions. I am passionate about bridging the gap between research and industry by transforming emerging AI concepts into usable systems that solve meaningful problems.

S.McGarity
Shannon McGarity
Co-founder, Hover Media LLC

Shannon is a former Senior Director of CX Strategy & Research with deep expertise in brand and experience design, ethnographic research, learning design, and GTM strategy — with a rare talent for turning complex data into stories that business teams can actually act on.

E.Zietlow
Elizabeth Zietlow
Co-founder, Hover Media LLC

EZ is a former VP of Experience Insights, Research & Strategy who has spent her career using data to ground organizations and move them forward through ambiguity — across CRM, loyalty, segmentation, and digital strategy at brands like Signet Jewelers, Citi FinTech, and eBay.

D.Panajkar
Dev Panajkar
CIO, XClaymation

Dev is CIO at Xclaymation and a former executive at Nike, Dollar General, and Marathon, Advance Auto Parts. He is an engineer and MBA with deep expertise in technology, AI, and enterprise innovation. He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and as a Board Certified (NACD.DC) executive; he currently serves as a Board Director on 2 companies. He is an author of 2 bestseller books (available on Amazon) – Turning Ideas into Impact, Creating a Line-of-Sight.