At QCon San Francisco 2025 I was the track host for “Empowering Teams with AI: Productivity and the Future of Software Development.”
The track’s brief was to embed Generative AI into your development lifecycle to boost productivity, ensure compliance, and future-proof your organization, which is close to a description of my day job, so it was a natural room to be in.
What a track host actually does
A track host owns the shape of the day: choosing the through-line, recruiting and selecting the speakers who can carry it, working with them ahead of time so the talks build on each other rather than repeat, and then running the room live: framing each session, keeping the discussion honest, and connecting what one speaker said to what the next one is about to say.
It is a curation and program-management problem more than a presenting one. You are responsible for whether an attendee who sits through the whole track leaves with a coherent argument or just a pile of unrelated demos.
Why this track
Most GenAI conference content in 2025 fell into one of two buckets: vendor demos, or abstract strategy with nothing underneath it. The useful middle, teams who had actually rolled this out, hit the real problems, and could say what worked, was much harder to find.
Track: Empowering Teams with AI at QCon San Francisco 2025
Wednesday, November 19, 2025 · Hyatt Regency, San Francisco
