What Exactly Is an Agent? + The POC That Never Ships

Two practitioner talks on building with AI, hosted inside Accenture at Circle Square and co-hosted with The Syntax Social. Emily Price, a data engineer at Accenture, built her own agentic coding harness to work out what an agent actually is. She'll walk through how it works, demo it live and compare it with fuller-featured harnesses. Raji Bhamidipati, senior AI product manager at Finova, follows with why so many GenAI projects die after the proof of concept: baselines, kill criteria, evaluation, audit trails, cost per decision and who runs it at 2am. Oluwadara Adebobola of GWI hosts. Doors 5:45pm with food, talks from 6:20pm, networking until 8:30pm. Free, but it's inside Accenture's building: register with your full name as it appears on your photo ID and bring the ID, or you won't get in. Why go: one under-the-hood build and one hard look at getting AI into production, from people doing both. Best for engineers and product people shipping AI.