When your product is a model, who owns the pager, and who owns the bill?
AI has collapsed the boundaries between three teams that used to operate on separate clocks. SRE keeps it up.DevOps ships it. FinOps pays for it. With AI as both the product and the operating layer, none of them can do their job without the other two, and most organizations haven't figured out what that org chart looks like.
This QualityAI-hosted panel brings senior engineering leaders together to argue about it in public.
What we'll get into:
1. Reliability without a rulebook
Non-deterministic systems break the SRE playbook. What does an SLO mean when the same input returns a different answer? Where does AI-assisted triage stop being helpful and start being a second incident?
2. Delivery pipelines that can say no
Evaluation gates, rollback paths, and cost controls in CI: necessary discipline or expensive theater?
3. The bill nobody modeled
Inference vs. training, agent loop amplification, retry storms, context bloat.Which of these is a FinOps problem, and which is an architecture problem wearing a FinOps costume?
Who should come:
Engineering leaders, platform owners, SREs, business leaders, and FinOps practitioners already running AI in production, or about to.
speakers
Vincent Tripodi
VP – Engineering, Associated Press
Vincent “Vince” Tripodi is Vice President of Engineering at The Associated Press, where he leads the development and modernization of technology platforms supporting one of the world’s most trusted news organizations.
During more than two decades at AP, Vince has provided technical leadership across software engineering, enterprise architecture, cloud transformation, content platforms, data services and emerging technologies. He has played a central role in evolving the systems that create, process, enrich and distribute text, photography, video and other forms of journalism to customers around the world.
Vince is also helping shape AP’s adoption of artificial intelligence, including the development of AI-enabled platforms, intelligent content workflows and scalable engineering capabilities that make AP journalism easier to discover, access and integrate. His leadership combines technology innovation with the reliability, security and operational resilience required to support a global, real-time news organization.
Abhishek Gupta
Director – Platform Engineering, Wolters Kluwer
A technology leader with more than 25 years of experience, Abhishek currently serves as Director of Platform Engineering at Wolters Kluwer. He leads enterprise capabilities across software engineering, AI enablement, DevOps, performance engineering, and platform modernization to help teams build resilient, high-performing expert solutions for the medicine and research community. His expertise includes GenAI adoption, resilient architecture, cloud and DevOps transformation, and building engineering organizations that successfully translate emerging technologies into strategic business outcomes.
Connor Smith
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Natwest Group
Connor is a Senior SRE with extensive experience designing, developing, and operating enterprise-scale technology solutions. He specializes in automation, ServiceNow integrations, discovery and service mapping, and observability platforms, with deep expertise across monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting capabilities. Connor has a proven track record of delivering automated runbooks, self-healing workflows, service restoration automation, and request fulfilment solutions that enhance operational efficiency, improve service resilience, and increase platform availability. His expertise spans modern cloud and DevOps practices, with strong AWS development capabilities and experience building scalable cloud-native solutions using Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks. Passionate about reliability engineering and operational excellence, Connor focuses on leveraging automation and observability to simplify operations, accelerate issue resolution, and deliver resilient digital services at scale.
