Venue: Room MAL B33, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet St, London WC1E 7HX
Please note:
1\. 🚨🚨🚨 This event is in a new venue in Birkbeck University. 🚨🚨🚨
2.🚨🚨🚨 A valid photo ID is required by building security. 🚨🚨🚨
3\. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please familiarise yourself with it before attending.
If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.
If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as possible.
Code of Conduct:
This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns.
As always, there will be free food and drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.
Main Talks
1. Sultan Al Awar and Ksenia Shishkanova- From PoC to Production: Building Scalable Agentic Applications
As more companies explore the potential of Gen AI, many hit the same challenge: turning a cool demo into something that actually works in production and brings real value. In production, teams quickly run into issues like unreliable tool execution, missing evaluation baselines, prompt regressions, unclear governance, poor observability, weak versioning practices, and vendor/model lock-in. This talk focuses on how to move beyond prototyping and build agentic systems that are measurable, reliable, and safe to deploy.
We’ll walk through the evolution of agent design, starting with prompting and RAG, then progressing to tool-using agents and multi-agent orchestration, and highlight what breaks at each stage. You’ll learn practical AgentOps patterns including how to version agents as AI assets, evaluate performance using LLM-as-a-Judge, build golden datasets with human feedback, and implement end-to-end observability with tracing and online/offline monitoring using MLflow.
The session will conclude with a production checklist and a reference architecture for deploying agents with model-agnostic routing, guardrails, payload