Mastering the AI System Design Methodology
AI systems behave fundamentally differently from traditional software — they reason, retrieve, learn, and act with autonomy.
These behaviors introduce new failure modes: retry storms, inference cost surges, misaligned agent actions, semantic drift, and retrieval errors.
Most system design approaches were never built to handle these risks.
This talk presents the A.R.C.H.A.I. Blueprint
(AI-Ready Contextual Human-Aligned Initiative),
a modern, AI-first architecture methodology that helps organizations design systems that are safe, scalable, resilient, and aligned with human intent.
Through vivid scenarios drawn from Dreamazon—a fictional global retailer—we show how classical architecture breaks when AI agents interact with APIs, data, and user flows.
Attendees learn how to extend the traditional C4 model into C4+, incorporating AI reasoning layers, retrieval paths, guardrails, drift surfaces, and human oversight points.
Participants also engage in an Architecture Lab, applying ARCHAI to design an AI-powered system using real templates, patterns, and safety practices.
This session equips architects, developers, and technical leaders with the frameworks and confidence needed to build AI-first systems responsibly.
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Key Skills You Will Learn
•How to design systems that incorporate AI reasoning and autonomous behavior
•How to extend C4 into C4+, modeling intelligence, retrieval, guardrails, and safety layers
•How to build AI-safe flows with idempotency, retry constraints, and ambiguity handling
•How to architect Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent orchestration
•How to map business capabilities and value chains for AI transformation
•How to identify AI-specific failure patterns and design to prevent them
•How to define drift detection, cost ceilings, and guardrail policies
•How to create an AI-first governance and ownership model
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What You Will Take Away
•A complete understanding of the A.R.C.H.A.I. Blueprint
•A reusable C4+ architecture template for designing AI systems
•Practical patterns to prevent runaway AI behavior, duplication, and cost explosions
•A framework for aligning AI systems with business intent and human oversight
•Tools for modeling retrieval boundaries and agent interaction flows
•A clear professional roadmap for becoming an AI-first architect
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Agenda
•Why traditional system design breaks when AI agents enter the system
•Realistic case studies from Dreamazon’s Black Friday failures
•Introduction to the A.R.C.H.A.I. Blueprint
•How to apply the six pillars to real-world AI use cases
•Extending the C4 model into C4+ for AI architecture
•Modeling reasoning paths, retrieval pipelines, and safety constraints
•Architecture Lab: Building an AI-ready system using ARCHAI
•Design templates, scorecards, and guardrail patterns
•Roadmap for evolving into an AI-first architect
About Rohit Bhardwaj
Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution.
Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects.
Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences.
Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com.
http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.