Autonomy
On-Device ML
Enterprise Use Case
Industrial Edge
Behind every AI product at WBD lies a shared foundation — a unified AI/ML architecture designed to handle everything from data ingestion to large-scale model deployment. In this session, we’ll take you under the hood of the platform that powers recommendations, personalization, content understanding, and more. You’ll learn how we designed for scalability, flexibility, and reliability across a diverse product portfolio, and the lessons we learned building an AI infrastructure that can serve billions of interactions a day.
Data Privacy & Governance
Enterprise Use Case
Nenad Mancevic
Principal Software Engineer
Warner Brothers Discovery
Memory
Rochan Sankar
Co-Founder & CEO
Enfabrica
Rochan is Founder, President and CEO of Enfabrica. Prior to founding Enfabrica, he was Senior Director and leader of the Data Center Ethernet switch silicon business at Broadcom, where he defined and brought to market multiple generations of Tomahawk/Trident chips and helped build industry-wide ecosystems including 25G Ethernet and disaggregated whitebox networking.
Prior, he held roles in product management, chip architecture, and applications engineering across startup and public semiconductor companies. Rochan holds a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from the Wharton School, and has 6 issued patents.
Anahita Mouro
Global Lead, Data Center Field Reliability & Quality
Google
Transformational Quality Leader with over 15 years of experience in mission-critical industries and technical infrastructure with a proven track record in driving operational excellence and product reliability and quality improvements through innovative strategies, exceptional leadership, and meticulous execution. She is adept at enhancing organizational efficiency, reducing costs, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Anahita is a certified ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt and Quality Engineer with deep expertise in managing large-scale projects and leading cross-functional teams to achieve strategic goals.
Passionate about building and leading high-performing technical teams and enable their success and growth.
Running workloads on the edge means operating with a finite amount of compute resources, which means that running workloads as lightweight as possible is generally preferable. In contrast, securely operating workloads in the cloud often means spinning up additional virtual machines for strong workload isolation. On the edge, this strategy is often not feasible. This talk covers how you can securely run containers in lightweight Kubernetes clusters on the edge entirely without the need for virtualization. This talk will cover different hardening approaches and compare them with special focus on securing AI workloads on the edge.
Autonomy
On-Device ML
Compute
Industrial Edge
Lukas Gentele
CEO
vCluster Labs
Lukas Gentele is the CEO & Co-Founder of vCluster Labs, a venture-backed startup virtualizing Kubernetes to enable advanced tenancy models to increase utilization, reduce cost and make Kubernetes more dynamic than ever. vCluster enables platform and infra teams to create virtual Kubernetes clusters which are as scalable and isolated as traditional clusters but much more lightweight and versatile. Trusted by companies such as CoreWeave, Nscale, Adobe, and Deloitte, vCluster enables organizations to create fully isolated tenant clusters on any infrastructure, from public cloud to private clouds all the way to AI supercomputers powered by the latest GPUs. Lukas has been a keynote speaker and presenter at events such as KubeCon, DevOpsDays, ContainerConf, as well as at AWS and Kubernetes Community Days around the world.
Data Privacy & Governance
Rohith Vangalla
Lead Software Engineer
Optum
Dr. Rohith Vangalla is a Senior IEEE Member, AI Researcher, and Lead Software Engineer at Optum Technologies, specializing in AI-driven automation, cybersecurity, and enterprise AI infrastructure. With over ten years of experience, he has pioneered AI solutions in healthcare, digital marketing, and aviation, publishing impactful research that has transformed industry practices. At Optum, he has been instrumental in developing AI-driven chatbots, secure automation frameworks, and scalable AI solutions that enhance efficiency, compliance, and real-time decision-making. As a scholar, reviewer, and judge for major AI conferences, Dr. Vangalla continues to shape the future of AI infrastructure, privacy-first systems, and responsible AI development.
Networking
Vladimir Stonjanvic
CTO & Co-founder
Ayar Labs
Vladimir is the Chief Technology Officer of Ayar Labs. Prior to founding Ayar Labs, he led the team that designed the world’s first processor to communicate using light. Vladimir was recently a professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, and was one of the key developers of the Rambus high-speed link technology. He holds a PhD from Stanford University.
Panelists
Erick Dela Pena
Director, Sales Engineering
Coresite
Taymur Ahmad
Founder & CEO
actnano
Taymur Ahmad is the Founder and CEO of actnano Inc. Prior to founding actnano, Mr. Ahmad had 18 years of manufacturing management experience with Fortune 50 companies such as Alcoa and Philips Electronics. Among other accolades, in 2010 he was awarded the "Visionary of the Year" award by Surface Mount Technology magazine. Mr. Ahmad's success stories have been featured in various magazines and newspapers including USA Today. Dell's Center for Entrepreneurs picked Mr. Ahmad to be one of the top 50 CEO's in the world. He is a member of the Dell founders 50 club and the Philips Alumni Club. Mr. Ahmad speaks 5 languages, and has lived in Europe and Asia. He earned his MBA from Business School Lausanne in Switzerland, and his Engineering degree from the University of Iowa.
Gil Santaliz
Founder & CEO
NJFX
Gil Santaliz is the Founder and CEO of NJFX, the first Premium Connectivity Hub positioned in Wall, New Jersey. Gil has pioneered two decades of experience in the telecommunications industry with vast experience in subsea and data center infrastructure.
NJFX has established a unique ecosystem that enables 35+ network operators across Europe, South America, and the Caribbean to interconnect without recurring cross-connect fees.
NJFX is a 64,000-square-foot subsea colocation facility, offering Tier 3 infrastructure
designed to provide resilient, secure, and redundant network connectivity. It features three Meet-Me Rooms, ensuring diverse and scalable interconnection options. NJFX’s strategic location and robust infrastructure drive the development of secure, low-latency pathways that bypass legacy choke points, enhancing the efficiency and security of global networks.
Moderator
Dave Driggers
CEO
Cirrascale Cloud Services
Dave Driggers is the Chief Executive and Technical Officer and founder of Cirrascale Cloud Services. Mr. Driggers establishes and drives the vision and mission of the company while providing guidance for the development and implementation of the company’s specialized cloud-based, bare-metal server and accelerator partner for artificial intelligence development, training and inference solutions. As the previous founder of Racksaver, Verari Systems, and Cirrascale Corporation, he has an extensive background in hardware development serving various HPC and Artificial Intelligence vertical markets.
Autonomy
Robotics
On-Device ML
Enterprise Use Case
Industrial Edge
Panelists
Joji Philip
Director, AI & ML Products
Ericsson
Krishna Rangasayee
Founder and CEO
SiMa.ai
Krishna Rangasayee is Founder and CEO of SiMa.ai. Previously, Krishna was COO of Groq and at Xilinx for 18 years, where he held multiple senior leadership roles including Senior Vice President and GM of the overall business, and Executive Vice President of global sales. While at Xilinx, Krishna grew the business to $2.5B in revenue at 70% gross margin while creating the foundation for 10+ quarters of sustained sequential growth and market share expansion. Prior to Xilinx, he held various engineering and business roles at Altera Corporation and Cypress Semiconductor. He holds 25+ international patents and has served on the board of directors of public and private companies.
Ian Anderson
VP, AI
Glance AI
Moderator
Paul Karazuba
VP of Marketing
Expedera
Paul is Vice President of Marketing at Expedera, a leading provider of AI Inference NPU semiconductor IP. He brings a talent for transforming new technology into products that excite customers. Previously, Paul was VP Marketing at PLDA, specializing in high-speed interconnect IP, until its acquisition by Rambus. Before PLDA, he was Senior Director of Marketing at Rambus. Paul brings more than 25 years of marketing experience including Quicklogic, Aptina (Micron), and others. He holds a BS in Management and Marketing from Manhattan College.
Data Privacy & Governance
Gen AI
Pallishree Panigrahi
Head of Data
Amazon Key
Pallishree Panigrahi is the Head of Data at Amazon Key, where she leads global data strategy, engineering, and analytics to power Amazon’s smart access and delivery products. With over 15 years of experience at Amazon, Meta, and other leading organizations, she has developed scalable data platforms that drive innovation, operational excellence, and customer trust.
Her work encompasses predictive intelligence, real-time feedback loops, and ethical AI frameworks that shape user-centric technology. Pallishree is passionate about designing intelligent systems that harmonize innovation with accountability, and she regularly shares insights on how to construct trustworthy AI from data to deployment.
Nikhil Sukhtankar
Head of Product Conversational AI & Messaging Platforms
PayPal
As Head of AI & Messaging Platforms org at PayPal, Nikhil leads Product Management & Conversational AI Design teams. Nikhil is responsible for defining the vision & strategy to bring advancements in AI, especially Generative AI & NLU/NLP to power intuitive & intelligent experiences for PayPal's Consumers & Small-Medium Business Merchants. He brings over two decades of experience in building and growing enterprise scale consumer products across technology start-ups, growth companies and S&P 500 large companies. In recent years, my focus has been on building enterprise-scale vertical Applied AI platforms that offer capabilities & services such as AI powered Chatbot, Voice / IVR applications, Semantic & Lexical Search, Agent Assist Solutions (Smart Replies, Summarization) etc within Consumer Wallet, Payments, SMB Merchants, Shopping / Rewards & Customer Success domains. Nikhil also is a Product Advisor to a handful of startups leaders and CEOs. Nikhil has a technical background with Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and has also earned an AI & ML certification from MIT.
Manu Fontaine
Governing Board Member
Confidential Computing Consortium
Manu Fontaine serves on the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium, hosted within the Linux Foundation. He is also the Founder and CEO of Hushmesh Inc., a Public Benefit cybersecurity startup and NATO DIANA Innovator based in the Washington, D.C. area. Hushmesh is developing, deploying, and operating the Mesh—a global information infrastructure akin to the Web, but with automated, decentralized cryptographic security built in. Built entirely on Confidential Computing technology, the Mesh blueprint is mathematically and technically optimal for securing the Agentic Era. Prior to Hushmesh, Manu led identity, privacy, and security-centric product initiatives in the data center, mobile, and consumer spaces at Brightspot, EMC, AOL, and Alcatel. He holds two Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
Moderator
Hitesh Seth
Chief Architect, Financial Services and Insurance
Salesforce
At Salesforce, Hitesh is responsible for the end-to-end architecture of platforms delivered to financial services and insurance clients globally. His focus is on working with key strategic customers to align Salesforce implementations with their business goals, particularly around the conjunction of Data+AI and CRM. This involves collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets to influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries. A significant part of Hitesh's role includes facilitating discussions with CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to: • Analyze current architectures and design target states. • Optimize Salesforce technologies for customer needs. • Integrate and Interoperate with Salesforce platforms within broader ecosystems. Being the executive sponsors for the customers, I play a key role in influencing product development within Salesforce by advocating for customer-driven innovations.
Hitesh oversees end-to-end platform and solution architecture for global financial services and insurance clients. He specializes in aligning Salesforce solutions with strategic business objectives, particularly at the intersection of Data+AI and CRM. By collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets, Hitesh helps influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries.
A key part of his role involves engaging CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to analyze current architectures, design target states, and optimize Salesforce within broader ecosystems. As an executive sponsor, Hitesh champions customer-driven innovation, ensuring product development meets evolving industry needs.