World Congress 2026 North America
AI ROI: The Hard Unit Economics of AI-Native Engineering
Manu Gurudatha
Manu Gurudatha, VP of Engineering at PagerDuty
World Congress 2026 North America
World Congress 2026 North America
September 23–25, 2026 · San José, CA
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In the transition from lab to production, AI systems often hit a wall: accuracy drops, environmental variables (hardware, hallucinations) introduce chaos, and scaling costs explode. Most teams try to “brute-force” these problems with more data or compute. However, true success in high-stakes enterprise AI requires a different approach: Strategic Creativity.
In this session, I will dissect two contrasting case studies to reveal how creative problem-solving overcomes technical bottlenecks. First, we will explore the development of a Unified Intent Recognition Engine, demonstrating how a product-first modular architecture can turn fragmented development into a scalable, high-ROI pipeline. Second, we will look at a Computer Vision project that went “sideways,” illustrating the brutal reality of hallucinations and hardware constraints and how a creative pivot saved the initiative from total failure.
World Congress 2026 North America
Manu Gurudatha
Manu Gurudatha, VP of Engineering at PagerDuty
World Congress 2026 North America
Tomislav Tipurić
Chief Technology Officer, Nephos
World Congress 2026 North America
Ajita Kanchivakam Ananth
Staff Technical Program Manager at Google
World Congress 2026 North America
Vivek Pandit
Principal Engineer at Cadence