AI is everywhere in development right now. Coding assistants. Autonomous agents. Background workflows. AI-generated PRs. But most teams are stuck in the same place:

• Experiments work, production doesn’t.
• AI writes code faster, but workflows break.
• Agents generate output, but teams can’t trust or scale it.
• And governance gets added too late, slowing everything down.

This meetup is for developers and platform teams who want to understand what it actually takes to move from AI experimentation to production-ready workflows. We’ll focus on how teams are redesigning their development workflows to work with AI, not just adding tools on top. That includes how to structure workflows, manage agents, and introduce the right level of control without killing developer velocity. No hype. No tool comparisons. Just a clear look at why most AI workflows fail and what actually works at scale.

You’ll walk away with:
- A clear understanding of why most AI workflows break when moving to production
- Insight into how AI changes the software development lifecycle, not just coding
- A practical model for structuring AI workflows across planning, building, and operations
- Examples of how teams are introducing control and consistency without slowing developers down
- A mental model for scaling AI usage across teams, not just individual developers

Tech Talk: Deploy AI Agents in Secure Development Environments
Speaker: Dave Ahr, Coder
Abstract: As AI adoption accelerates, enterprise development infrastructure often struggles to keep pace. Relying on traditional setups like local laptops, VDIs, fragmented tools, and unmanaged AI services exposes organizational weaknesses and creates significant AI governance failures, including a lack of operational control, poor observability, weak data policy enforcement, and untracked LLM costs.
In this talk, Dave Ahr explores how enterprises can safely navigate their AI transformation across three key phases: Migrate (moving off unmanaged endpoints to self-hosted environments), Modernize (integrating governed AI assistants), and Multiply (scaling autonomous AI workflows securely). Attendees will learn the five critical requirements of an effective AI-DLC (AI Development Lifecycle) execution layer.

Tech Talk: Agents Can't Read the Room: Platform Engineering for AI-Native Development
Speaker: Mallory Haigh, PEC
Abstract: Every platform team being asked to support AI-native development runs into the same thing in a slightly different order: the standards agents need to converge on were never written down anywhere. The definition of done lived in the judgment of a handful of senior engineers, review norms lived in reputation, and the boundaries of what a service was allowed to touch lived in everybody knowing who to ask. Agents can't ask and they can't infer, so all of it has to become explicit before any of it can be automated.
In this talk, platform therapist Mallory Haigh draws on a background as a full-stack engineer, an anthropologist, and a platform engineering trainer to cover what that excavation involves and why platform teams are the only group positioned to do it. The session works through developer experience as context engineering, governance as a runtime property rather than a mess of policy documents, and agent infrastructure as the place recovered organizational knowledge lives and works.

Agenda:
* 5:30pm~6:00pm: Checkin, Food and Networking
* 6:00pm~6:15pm: Welcome/community update
* 6:15pm~8:00pm: Tech talks and Q&A
* 8:00pm~8:30pm: Open discussion & Mixer

Speakers/Topics:
Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules.
If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics

Venue:
St. Paul Bloor, 227 E Bloor St, Toronto

Sponsors:
We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community.  Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will not only speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, but also gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 10,000+ AI developers in Toronto and 500K+ worldwide.

Local and Global AI Community on Discord
Join us on discord for local and global AI tech community:
- Events chat: chat and connect with speakers and global and local attendees;
- Learning AI: events, learning materials, study groups;
- Startups: innovation, projects collaborations, founders/co-founders;
- Jobs and Careers: job openings, post resumes, hiring managers;