Two talks on building an AI-native culture inside a start-up, and bringing agent-driven operations to infrastructure teams.

Location

We are, as always, very thankful to the University of Hull for kindly providing the space for the event. We will be in the Brynmor Jones Library - Teaching Room 4. (See Point 27 on the University Campus Map)

Parking

Parking is available in Wilberforce Multi Storey Car Park as there are no enforcements in that area between 17:00 and 08:30.

Our Speakers

We are delighted to have two speakers for this event.

Speaker: Gordon McKenzie, Senior Director of AI and Innovation at BigHand

Title: Building an AI-native culture at a tech start-up

A walk-through of a series of learnings from trying to find the best way to work natively with AI at a small start-up. Gordon was CTO and co-founder of ayora.ai, acquired by BigHand in 2026, so this is the view from inside a team that had to work it out as it went.

Speaker: Ed Moore, Customer Success Technical Leader - Automation & Observability at Cisco

Title: AgenticOps in practice: from automation to agent ecosystems

Ed explores practical approaches to driving AgenticOps adoption across infrastructure teams: evolving from traditional automation to collaborative agent ecosystems, building confidence with human-in-the-loop safety checks, and enabling agent-driven self-service. He has spent the last 13 years as an engineer, developer and leader across automation, cloud-native platforms and service orchestration, and now focuses on customer success, helping teams turn complex network infrastructure into practical, automated workflows and clear adoption roadmaps.

Description supplied by the event organiser.