Think Outside the Box, Deploy Inside It: AI Agent Control via Infrastructure

Speaker: Priya Ananthasankar

Room: CC 236

Time: Sun 11:20 am – 11:50 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Introductory / Some experience required

Track: Development & Dev Tools

Additional Tags: DevOps, AI / ML, Creative

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: several-th time speaking

Description:

What’s the balance between giving AI agents enough autonomy to be useful and keeping them under control? This session explores that tension through a practical experiment: deploying the same AI agent across progressively more constrained environments and observing how its behavior changes.

Priya walks through three stages:

Unrestricted deployment — watching how an unconstrained agent explores and behaves

Tightened constraints — limiting environment, permissions, or resources and analyzing the impact

Minimal guardrails — identifying the smallest set of controls needed to ensure safety, reproducibility, and reliability without killing creativity

Through concrete examples, attendees will discover:

How much freedom an agent actually needs to stay useful

How far you can lock things down before losing value

Where the real control points live — and why control is about *channeling* creativity, not caging it

This talk blends infrastructure, DevOps, and AI agent design to show how deployment environments shape agent behavior as much as model architecture.

Target Audience:

Cloud engineers

DevOps engineers

Infrastructure engineers

AI practitioners