Opening Remarks

Good morning and welcome to AI Engineer New York 2026.

We're thrilled to have you with us as we kick off an event of big ideas, sharp perspectives, and plenty of signal cutting through the noise.

To officially open the event for us this morning, please welcome to the stage AI Engineer's General Manager, Lia McBride.

Hi, good morning everyone, and welcome to New York.

This is our third event in New York.

We had two in 2025 with some of our greatest speakers that we've ever had at AI Engineer.

So we're really excited to be back.

So just a huge welcome from myself and swyx to everyone.

Thanks for attending today.

We hope you're going to have a great few days.

There's very, very few places like New York City, as we know, where big ideals scale very,

very fast.

It is where Frontier AI comes to meet centuries-old global financial institutions

and where multiple different economies thrive together.

So we're excited to have an incredible lineup.

You're going to hear from some of the world's best speakers, just like at all our events.

We have got people, we've got tracks in finance.

We've got engineering, leadership, evals, and LLM.

um we've got Aparna Dhinakaran i'm gonna get that right uh from Arize we've got Max Kanat-Alexander

from capital one and Tariq Shaukat from sonar that's just a few of the incredible speakers

that we've got this week uh i'm going to say a huge thank you to Arize who's our presenting sponsor

you guys can go and meet their team in the expo any point this week so uh lean in to learning here

lean into connecting as well

there's so many people here

that are sharing ideas

they want to talk about

the ideas, they want to challenge ideas

and they want to collaborate as well

so make sure to speak to as many people as

possible, your attendees, speakers

and all the sponsors

and we hope to see you again soon

we do have a great line up

we've got

another event called Summit in San Francisco in November.

And then we have London lined up in February. And then of course, World's Fair. And we've got a couple of other events happening next year as well that are new.

So keep an eye on the schedule. But have a wonderful few days. Thank you so much. Take care.

And now, please welcome to the stage, your MC for the day, managing partner at Tenex, Alex Lieberman.

What's up, everyone? How's it going?

There we go.

Before we hop into the official stuff, I just want to start by introducing myself and asking you a quick question.

Alex Lieberman.

I'm one of the co-founders and co-managing partners at Tenex.

We're an applied AI company working with Fortune 500 businesses to become AI native.

Before that, I co-founded a business called Morning Brew, which makes business news suck

a little bit less.

My question for you is, who in the room, raise your hand, if you are healthily addicted to

X or formerly known as Twitter?

Okay, a lot of people are lying in the room.

I spend a lot of time on X. And one of the reasons that I spend a lot of time on X is because I feel

like I get to live in the future, right? When you're scrolling through X, when you're looking

at the commentary on the platform, you feel like you're seeing what will become consensus in three,

six, or 12 months. And what I love about this conference and why I get so excited to come to

it every single year is because this almost feels like X on steroids. There's this concept that a

friend told me a while back called Edge City. And Edge City is this concept that at any point in

some part of the world, there are a group of people that are living in the future in a specific

function or specialty. And the way I think about this conference is we are all living in Edge City

for what will be consensus in the next six months to two years, if you really think about

the diffusion of this technology. So I'm super excited to be part of this with you all today,

and now let's hop into what's going to happen. First of all, welcome to AI Engineer New York

2026, where AI engineering meets Wall Street. This is the conference for engineers and technical

leaders building production AI across banking, hedge funds, fintech, insurance, and asset

management.

Over the next two days, we will hear from companies and leaders sparking discussion

not only on models, agents, infra, compute, dev tools, and evals, but then how they weave

and shape the financial industry impacting hedge funds, investors, banks, insurance,

fintech, and security.

Of course, as you all can tell, there's a lot going on.

Putting together a gathering like this requires a huge amount of effort,

and it could not be done without our sponsors.

But before our sponsors, let's all just give a huge shout-out to the AIE team.

What they do is incredible.

Now, let's give some flowers to the sponsors.

First up, the presenting sponsor, Arize.

Let's give it up for Arize.

Yeah, Arize.

Next up, the platinum sponsors, Oracle, Sonar, WorkOS, and Exa.

Let's give it up for them.

Then we have our gold sponsors.

If I had enough time, I'd rattle all of them off.

And finally, the silver sponsors.

But wait, there's more, the supporting sponsors.

Awesome.

So we are going to hop into the first keynote of the day.

We have two amazing folks from Bridgewater who are in the weeds of production AI every single day.

So let's give it up for them.

Welcome, guys.