The Happy Accident of Agentic AI: My Unconventional Path to the First Principles of Autonomous Systems
Let's dive into the world of Agentic and Generative AI through a lens that’s both personal and technical. In this session, I’ll share my unconventional journey through the “happy accident” of autonomous systems, and how starting from first principles has guided the way I understand, design, and engineer intelligent technology. We’ll explore the recent evolution of AI with real-world examples, uncover where misconceptions arise, and look ahead to where agentic systems are heading. By the end, you’ll gain a grounded understanding of how ML and AI actually work, and how curiosity and first-principles thinking can empower you to build your own purposeful, autonomous solutions.
Tanmay Bakshi
Recognized as The Toronto Star’s “Newsmaker of the Year” in 2013 after publishing an acclaimed iOS app at age nine, Tanmay Bakshi is an internationally celebrated AI prodigy, keynote speaker, and technological innovator. In 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek named him among its top young entrepreneurs. Over the past decade, he has delivered keynotes on AI, innovation, and the future of technology across 30+ countries, presenting for the United Nations, Apple, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, KPMG, the Linux Foundation, Heineken, Shell, HSBC, and Amazon — reaching more than 400,000 business leaders, government officials, developers, and students.
Tanmay’s roles span engineering and education: AI & Software Architect for IBM watsonx; Google Developer Expert for Machine Learning; TED and keynote speaker; author; researcher at iU B Lab Tokyo; and instructor at the University of Winnipeg. He also maintains a prominent media and YouTube presence. He set out to empower 100,000 people with technology — an impact milestone he has already surpassed — and his work has been featured by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC, CBC, and many more.
He is the author of four technology books: Hello Swift!; Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson; and McGraw-Hill’s Tanmay Teaches series — Tanmay Teaches Go and Tanmay Teaches Julia. The latter two have been translated into Korean and Japanese respectively, expanding access for learners worldwide.
From his beginnings as a coder at age five, Tanmay continues to drive applied AI with IBM, contributing to McDonald’s drive-thru voice agents, building AI-assisted songwriting tools, and developing heartbeat-based individual recognition and EEG-based mental-state decoding.
His contributions have been recognized with the Knowledge Ambassador Award from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, Twilio’s Doer Award, the Life Mentor Award from the Creative Foundation, and the Young Edison Award from Shanghai TV, just to name a few.
