The Cost Cliff: Improve Your Tokenomics as you Grow, ft. Character.AI & Inferact

70% of AI spend is now inference. See how Character.AI partnered with Inferact and DigitalOcean to cut inference costs by 50%, while improving throughput, on AMD GPUs.

Speakers:

Archana Kamath, VP of Engineering, DigitalOceanPiyush Srivastava, Principal Engineer, DigitalOceanJames Groenveld, Chief Architect, Character.aiSimon Mo, CEO, Inferact

Built for Mass Scale: Hard-Won Lessons from Teams Running High Volume Inference Workloads in Production

Scaling inference isn't a model problem. It's a decisions problem. Industry leaders from Workato Research Lab, ISMG, and Hippocratic AI share the decisions, tradeoffs, and investments that got them to production AI at scale.

Moderator:

Karnik Modi, Senior Manager of Engineering, DigitalOcean

Panelists:

Oscar Wu, AI Research Technical Lead, WorkatoDan Grosu, CTO/CISO, ISMGDebo Datta, Co-Founder, Hippocratic AI

Open by Design: How NVIDIA and DigitalOcean Are Building the Stack for the Always-On Agentic Era

Kari Briski, VP Gen AI, NVIDIA, and Salman Paracha, SVP AI, DigitalOcean discuss why AI-native teams are demanding openness, model flexibility, and infrastructure built for agents that never sleep — and how the convergence of NVIDIA's software layer and DigitalOcean's platform is designed to meet exactly that moment.

Speakers:

Salman Paracha, SVP of Engineering, DigitalOceanKari Briski, VP of Generative AI Software Products, NVIDIA

Your Model Doesn't Matter. Your Infrastructure Does. with Weaviate

Everyone has access to the same models. So what actually matters? It's everything around them – routing requests to the right model, connecting to live data, scaling from prototype to production without ripping your code apart. We'll walk through the full journey: from a single API call to intelligent routing across GPU fleets, showing what it looks like when the platform owns the stack end to end. Live demos included.

Speakers:

Karthik Pandian, Senior Director of Engineering, DigitalOceanRyan O'Connor, Senior Developer Advocate, DigitalOceanBob Van Luijt, CEO & Co-Founder, Weaviate

Inference Routing: Automate Choosing the Best Model for Every Task

Model selection, routing logic, and the economics of running AI at volume — a technical walkthrough including live demo of how the layer between your request and your response actually works.

Speakers:

Amit Jotwani, Staff Developer Advocate, DigitalOceanApril Dagonese, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, DigitalOcean

AI Disruptors: How the Next Generation of Business is Being Built

Early-stage founders building real AI companies today—what they’re solving, what’s getting in the way, and how they’re pushing through it.

Moderator:

Dinesh Murthy, Director of Product Management, DigitalOcean

Panelists:

Peter Elias, Founder, Probably AIHovsep Seraydarian, Co-Founder, LawVoAlex Mashrabov, CEO & Co-founder, Higgsfield AIAngela Hoover, Co-Founder & CEO, Andi

The Inference Economy: How Venture Is Betting on the Agentic Era

Leading investors break down the economics of scaling AI in production, from infrastructure bottlenecks to open vs. closed ecosystems, and share their predictions for what the AI industry will look like in five years.

Moderator:

Meghan Grady, Senior Director of Marketing & Communications, DigitalOcean

Panelists:

Lauri Moore, Partner, Bessemer Venture PartnersBob Rosin, Managing Partner, AntlerVanessa Larco, Co-Founder, Premise VCSantiago Zavala, Global Managing Partner, 500 Global