===== 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