Your AI demo works. But is it ready for production?

You may already have an AI agent that can call a model, use a tool and complete a task once.

Then you put it in front of real users. Outputs become inconsistent. Tool failures go unnoticed. Evaluation results are hard to explain. Latency and cost keep climbing. When something goes wrong, the team is not sure whether to pause, roll back or hand the decision to a human.

This event starts with a practical question: how do we make AI agents reliable, testable, observable and accountable once they enter a real system?

A demo that runs once is not the same as a system you can trust in production.

What is missing between a demo and production?

AI Engineering: Agents, Harness & Production is an English-language technical meetup in Sydney for engineers, architects, AI product leaders, founders and serious builders working on AI systems, agent workflows and LLM products.

We will look beyond the polished demo. When an agent has to run repeatedly, call tools, handle failure, pass evaluations and take responsibility for user and business outcomes, what engineering boundaries does the system need?

Agents

How should an agent plan work, call tools, recover from failure and hand off uncertainty to a person?

Harness

How do Tools, Orchestration, Evals, Guardrails and Human Handoff become one workflow that can be tested and improved?

Production

How do you decide whether an AI feature is ready to ship, and keep tracking its quality and behaviour after launch?

Trade-offs

How do teams balance reliability, observability, latency, cost, security, user experience and accountability?

This is not a talk full of abstract concepts

The evening uses structured activities to turn AI Engineering ideas into decisions you can take back to a real project:

• Demo-to-Production Ladder: Map Idea, Prototype, Evaluation, Deployment and Monitoring on one path, then identify what is still missing before the system can be operated.
• Agent Failure Wall: Surface where agents fail across data, tools, permissions, model output and human handoff.
• Harness Design Clinic: Take one agent workflow apart and discuss how Tools, Orchestration, Evals, Guardrails and Human Handoff fit together.
• Production Readiness Roundtable: Compare real engineering trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, permissions, security, observability and accountability.
• 30-Day Ship Card: Leave with one production action or engineering assumption to validate in the next 30 days.

Bring one real question. Bring an agent, RAG or LLM problem you are actually facing. You do not need a finished system; a specific workflow, a failed tool call or an unresolved launch decision is enough.

Who should attend?

• AI, machine learning and software engineers
• Data Engineers, Platform Engineers, DevOps professionals and solution architects
• AI product managers, engineering leads and digital transformation leaders
• Founders and builders moving an AI product from idea to production
• People who have experimented with RAG, tool calling or agents and want stronger engineering foundations
• Technology professionals and serious learners moving from prompt experiments into AI Engineering

What will you take away?

• A clearer map from prototype to production
• An agent reliability, evaluation and observability checklist
• A set of engineering questions for deciding whether an AI feature is ready to ship
• A more concrete understanding of harnesses, tools, evals and human handoff
• Connections with Sydney professionals working across AI, data, software and product

Agenda

• 5:30–5:50 PM · Sydney Stack Check-in + Agent Failure Wall
• 5:50–6:00 PM · Opening: From Demo to Production
• 6:00–6:25 PM · From Demo to Prod: Building Reliable Software with AI
• 6:25–6:45 PM · Agent Harness Design Clinic
• 6:45–7:05 PM · Production Readiness Roundtable
• 7:05–7:20 PM · Production Trade-off Roundtable + Q&A
• 7:20–7:30 PM · 30-Day Ship Card + Closing

Event details

Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2026

Time: 5:30 PM–7:30 PM Sydney local time (AEDT / UTC+11)

Venue: Nutanix Sydney Office

Address: Level 10, Maritime Trade Towers, 201 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

Language: English

Price: Free

Registration: RSVP through this event page.

The talks and discussion will be in English. Speakers will be added once confirmed; no unconfirmed speaker details are being published.

Start with the demo. Do not stop there.