I Gave 200 People AI Agents and Here's What Actually Happened

About this session

I launched the GenAI for Everyone Initiative to do something ambitious — put AI tools in the hands of every kind of builder, not just ML engineers. What followed was a messy, humbling, and ultimately transformative journey. Some people built production-ready agents in a week. Others couldn't get past prompt engineering basics. A few quietly automated half their job and told no one. This talk is the unfiltered story of what happens when you democratize agentic AI across an organization — the adoption curves nobody warns you about, the unexpected resistance, the people who surprised you, and the cultural shifts that mattered more than the technology itself.

Speakers

• Karthik Akula, Senior Technical Account manager, AWS
• Yamini Rathamsetty, Senior Cloud Delivery Leader, AWS

Key takeaways

• The real adoption curve of AI tools across a diverse practitioner base — and why the "middle 60%" is where programs succeed or die
• What actually drives AI adoption (hint: it's not training, it's permission) — and the cultural blockers nobody talks about
• A repeatable enablement playbook for taking practitioners from AI-curious to AI-shipping without burning them out

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