API World + CloudX + DataWeek 2025: Full Schedule

Megha Sandesh, Solvedex, CEO

Most AI projects don’t fail because of bad ideas—they fail because of bad systems. Teams rush to deploy models without a clear design framework, leading to disjointed interfaces, brittle integrations, and mounting technical debt that becomes impossible to untangle. The result? AI that never reaches its full potential, burdened by rework, inconsistency, and scalability nightmares.

My session breaks down a pragmatic, battle-tested approach to AI design and delivery—one that isn’t just about getting a model into production but ensuring it thrives there. We’ll dig into how design, engineering, and operations must work in sync from day one to prevent the common pitfalls that derail AI initiatives.

Key takeaways include:

1. Why AI projects accumulate debt faster than traditional software—and how to stop it at the source.
2. The role of system design in AI, and why model accuracy alone won’t save a broken pipeline.
3. A real-world approach to designing AI that scales without accumulating chaos.

Speakers

Megha Sandesh

CEO, Solvedex & SolveX Design

Visionary leader with extensive experience in scaling companies and leading cross-functional teams to deliver exceptional results.Built a successful bootstrapped company from ground zero to $5M ARR in under 2 years through innovative lean strategies, cost optimization, and a relentless... Read More →

Friday September 5, 2025 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
CloudX -- Main Stage

CloudX

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks CloudX, OPEN Session, IT Operations and Enterprise Management (CloudX), Leading a Cloud-First Company (CloudX)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

10:30am PDT

OPEN Session (DataWeek): Ask Us Anything: Building Real-World AI Agents for Business

Friday September 5, 2025 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

DataWeek -- Main Stage

Lee Dickson, raia AI, Director of Sales and Operations
Rich Swier, raia AI, Founder

You’ve seen the hype. Now let’s get practical. In this live AMA-style session, Lee Dickson and Rich Swier — co-hosts of The AI Guys podcast and builders of raia AI — open the floor to the questions business leaders, operators, and tech pros are really asking about AI.

From deployment timelines to hallucination prevention, ethics to employee augmentation — nothing’s off limits. Whether you’re planning your first AI rollout or scaling from one use case to a dozen, this is your chance to get direct insights from AI practitioners who’ve helped companies from $5M startups to $500M enterprises make AI work.

Speakers

Lee Dickson

Director of Sales and Operations, raia AI

Lee Dickson brings 7+ years of experience in productizing AI solutions and predictive analytics, with a strong track record of streamlining operations and improving customer engagement for SMBs and enterprise clients. With an extensive background in technology and SaaS, he's an advocate... Read More →

Rich Swier

Founder, raia

Rich is a serial entrepreneur based in Sarasota, Florida. For the past 30 years, Rich has built and exited numerous successful tech businesses and continues to launch and incubate new ventures.

Friday September 5, 2025 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
DataWeek -- Main Stage

DataWeek

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks DataWeek, OPEN Session, Data Tools / Technology and Management (DataWeek), AI Models and Management (DataWeek)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

11:00am PDT

OPEN Session (CloudX): Conquering Data Consistency Challenges in Cloud-Native Applications

Friday September 5, 2025 11:00am - 11:25am PDT

CloudX -- Main Stage

Brijesh Deo, Oracle, Software Development
Todd Little, Oracle, Chief Architect

Data consistency is critical in the era of cloud-native applications built on microservices architecture due to distributed services and data stores. Inconsistent data can lead to incorrect decision-making, financial losses, downtime, and loss of reputation. Transactions are the proven method to ensure data consistency and can be effectively implemented with cloud-native applications. In this session, you will learn how to overcome the data consistency challenges by employing various transaction patterns. We will demonstrate how a Spring Boot application can, with minimal code changes, use these transaction patterns to ensure data consistency while maintaining scalability & reliability. We will also discuss how similar applications can be developed with other frameworks, such as Express.js, Micronaut, and Helidon, etc.

Speakers

Todd Little

Chief Architect, Oracle

Todd Little is chief architect for transaction processing products at Oracle, including the Oracle Tuxedo product family, Oracle Blockchain Platform, and Oracle Transaction Manager for Microservices (MicroTx). Todd is responsible for defining the technical strategy and direction for... Read More →

Brijesh Deo

Director, Software Development, Oracle

Brijesh Deo is the Director of MicroTx product development in the database organization at Oracle. He is passionate about distributed systems and cloud technologies and specializes in Kubernetes, Microservices, and Java. Brijesh has a rich industry experience of more than two decades... Read More →

Friday September 5, 2025 11:00am - 11:25am PDT
CloudX -- Main Stage

CloudX

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks CloudX, OPEN Session, Cloud Native Development (CloudX)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

11:00am PDT

OPEN Session (DataWeek): Data Integrity in the Age of AI: SBOMs, Lineage, and Trust in the Pipeline

Friday September 5, 2025 11:00am - 11:25am PDT

DataWeek -- Main Stage

Saloni Garg, Wayfair, Senior Software Engineer

With AI models consuming more data than ever, ensuring the integrity and traceability of that data is critical. This talk focuses on how to build trust into your data pipelines -- using concepts like SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) for datasets, audit trails, and metadata tagging to make data consumption safer and more transparent. I’ll also touch on how this ties into emerging compliance frameworks and how we’ve approached this in practice.

Speakers

Saloni Garg

Senior Software Engineer, Wayfair

International Red Hat Women in Open Source Awardee | Mozilla Open Leader 2019 | a strong open source diversity supporter | Google Venkat Scholarship winner | Speaker

Friday September 5, 2025 11:00am - 11:25am PDT
DataWeek -- Main Stage

DataWeek

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks OPEN Session, DataWeek, Data Governance and Security (DataWeek), Data Strategy / Analytics & Business Intelligence (DataWeek)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

11:30am PDT

OPEN Session (DataWeek): Rearchitecting Data Processing for Today’s Demands

Friday September 5, 2025 11:30am - 11:55am PDT

DataWeek -- Main Stage

Rajan Goyal, DataPelago, CEO & Co-founder

IT leaders face mounting pressure to leverage their organization’s data for genAI and lakehouse analytics. Yet, with data volumes doubling every two years and nearly 90% of new data being unstructured, traditional data processing architectures can’t keep up. Existing systems were designed for structured data and CPU-based computing, and businesses are finding they struggle with processing latency, high costs, and siloed data. In fact, more than 80% of IT leaders say that data silos are hindering digital transformation.

To drive value in today’s data environment, IT leaders need to implement new data processing architectures that are designed to handle massive volumes of complex data and are capable of taking advantage of the accelerated hardware (GPUs, FPGAs, CPU/SIMD, etc.) available in today’s cloud environments.

In this session, DataPelago CEO Rajan Goyal will outline the shortcomings of current data processing architectures and introduce attendees to the Universal Data Processing Engine, a software solution that sits between a data lake and query engine. Overcoming the shortcomings of traditional processing models, the UDPE is designed to handle all types of data (structured, unstructured, semi-structured) and work on top of any hardware. Integrating seamlessly into any tech stack, it accelerates data processing speed by 2-3x while cutting processing costs by 30-60% — enabling organizations to utilize all of their data for lakehouse analytics and AI workloads.

Speakers

Rajan Goyal

CEO & Co-founder, DataPelago

Rajan is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DataPelago, the company revolutionizing data processing for the accelerated computing era. His expertise and visionary approach have been instrumental in shaping the future of data infrastructure and processing. A seasoned innovator... Read More →

Friday September 5, 2025 11:30am - 11:55am PDT
DataWeek -- Main Stage

DataWeek

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks DataWeek, OPEN Session, Data Tools / Technology and Management (DataWeek)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

2:00pm PDT

OPEN Session (DataWeek): Transforming Seller Onboarding in Retail: Responsible AI, RAG, and Risk Management

Friday September 5, 2025 2:00pm - 2:25pm PDT

DataWeek -- Main Stage

Banani Mohapatra, Walmart, Senior Manager, Data Science
Bhavnish Walia, Amazon, Senior Risk Manager AI/ML

Onboarding new sellers onto retail platforms like Walmart and Amazon involves a complex, multi-step process designed to mitigate fraud and ensure compliance with global regulations. One of the most critical and cumbersome steps is Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, requiring sellers to upload documentation for identity verification, business registration, and compliance checks. This manual review process often leads to long approval times and delays, frustrating legitimate sellers and creating operational bottlenecks for compliance teams.
To address these challenges, we leveraged foundational models with custom prompting strategies, in-document summarization, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground responses in trusted data sources, powered by open-source LLM APIs. By automating document analysis and augmenting human reviewers with AI outputs, we reduced overall onboarding time by more than 20 percent, improving seller experience and operational efficiency.
However, deploying AI into a regulated process like KYC required a robust responsible AI framework combining scalability with governance. We implemented guardrail models to flag edge cases and ensure human oversight, enforced strict data anonymization protocols to protect sensitive information, and applied privacy-preserving techniques for model training. We also established a rigorous validation pipeline to test outputs against regulatory standards, mitigating risks such as hallucinations and interpretability gaps.
This talk offers actionable insights for data scientists, compliance officers, regulators, and machine learning practitioners working at the intersection of AI, risk management, and regulatory compliance. Presented by Bhavnish Walia, Senior Risk Manager at Amazon, and Banani Mohapatra, Senior Data Science Manager at Walmart, attendees will walk away with a practical framework for deploying AI in sensitive domains—covering risk management strategies, scalable AI architectures aligned with compliance, and key lessons on balancing innovation with accountability.

Speakers

Banani Mohapatra

Senior Manager, Data Science, Walmart

Banani Mohapatra is a data science leader with 12+ years of experience in e-commerce, payments, and real estate, specializing in machine learning, generative AI, LLMs, and causal AI. She leads a global data science team at Walmart, driving subscription growth with multi-billion-dollar... Read More →

Bhavnish Walia

Senior Risk Manager AI/ML, Amazon

Bhavnish Walia is a Senior Risk Manager at Amazon, where he leads AI Risk Management efforts focused on developing large language model (LLM) frameworks for data governance and regulatory compliance. He ensures the safe and compliant deployment of AI systems at scale. With over 12... Read More →

Friday September 5, 2025 2:00pm - 2:25pm PDT
DataWeek -- Main Stage

DataWeek

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks DataWeek, OPEN Session, Data Governance and Security (DataWeek)
In-Person/Virtual In Person

2:30pm PDT

OPEN Session (API): Hackathon Top 5 Demo

Friday September 5, 2025 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

DataWeek Expo Stage (OPEN)

Friday September 5, 2025 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
DataWeek Expo Stage (OPEN)

4. Hackathon

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks OPEN Session, API World, DataWeek, CloudX
In-Person/Virtual In Person

3:30pm PDT

OPEN Session: Closing Remarks + Hackathon Winners

Friday September 5, 2025 3:30pm - 3:55pm PDT

API World -- Main Stage Theater (OPEN)

Friday September 5, 2025 3:30pm - 3:55pm PDT
API World -- Main Stage Theater (OPEN)

4. Hackathon

Talk Type OPEN Session
Tracks OPEN Session, API World, CloudX
In-Person/Virtual In Person