• 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

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