Conference talks, keynotes, and podcast appearances by Alan Nichol, Founder & CTO of Rasa — mostly about AI agents, agentic architectures in production, and why enterprise software is more interesting than it looks.
Most enterprise AI agents being built right now won't make it to durable production — not because the models aren't good enough, but because the architectural choices made in the first 90 days quietly seal the project's fate. A decade of reading the leaves on which agent bets pay off in regulated enterprise, and which are cursed from the start.
Digital Day, Belgrade. A keynote on how organizations in highly regulated sectors can implement agentic AI architectures while maintaining compliance, control, and security — from the practitioner's perspective of shipping conversational AI into banks, telcos, and government for a decade.
LeadDev Meetup, Skyscanner HQ, Edinburgh — talking to engineering leaders about structuring agent platforms and the harness around the model, from a decade shipping conversational AI into regulated enterprise.
Rasa's own one-day summit in New York City, October 30, 2024. Focused on scaling conversational AI in enterprise — keynotes, masterclasses, panels on LLMs plus deterministic business logic.
A hands-on tutorial on building conversational AI systems using CALM and Rasa — bringing LLMs together with deterministic business logic without losing control.
Walkthrough of CALM — using LLMs to drive conversational flows while keeping business logic deterministic and auditable.
Chatbot Summit London, October 11–12, 2023. Day-one masterclass on moving past intent classification and leveraging LLMs in production conversational systems.
Chatbot Summit London, day-two keynote — discussing customer-interaction optimization with one of the world's largest telcos.
Co-presented with David Haber (CEO, Lakera) and Jamie MacDonald (Head of Security, Rasa) — what changes when you put LLMs into production at a regulated enterprise, and how to think about prompt-injection and exfiltration risk.
Reinforce AI Conference. Why building conversational software is a design problem more than an ML problem — and how to iterate on real user conversations instead of synthetic benchmarks.
A framework for thinking about chatbot maturity — from scripted responses to fully contextual assistants — and where most production systems actually live.
Opening keynote at the inaugural Rasa Developer Summit, laying out where open-source conversational AI was heading.
O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, New York 2018 — case study on how a large enterprise built a customer-acquisition assistant with Rasa NLU and Rasa Core.
O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, London 2018 — early case for moving from rigid state machines to ML-driven dialogue, using minimal training data plus interactive learning.
I'm selectively available in 2026 for keynotes, workshops, and occasional podcast episodes. Probably a yes if you're a conference about practical ML, an engineering org running an internal event, or a podcast with a guest list I admire.