Optimize Your Work and Life with Your Own AI Agent
AI agents are not just for developers. They are personal operating systems for your professional and personal life. In this session, Ken shares what it actually looks like to live and work with a personal AI agent — from morning briefs to travel ops to speaking pipeline automation — and provides a practical framework you can start deploying the same week.
Everyone talks about AI. Fewer people show what it looks like to actually live with one.
In this session, Ken shares his real-world deployment of a personal AI agent that runs across his work, speaking career, and personal life. This is not a demo of ChatGPT prompts. This is an operating model — built incrementally over time — that handles morning briefings, calendar privacy bridges, travel logistics, speaking pipeline automation, secure vault retrieval, relationship nudges, and nightly content creation while he sleeps.
The session covers a four-stage framework: Build (what your agent knows), Trust (the autonomy ramp), Delegate (what to hand off first), and Compound (where the real leverage comes from).
Attendees will see live or recorded demonstrations of real workflows, including:
- Morning brief: email triage, calendar alerts, priority surfacing
- Speaking pipeline: CFP tracking, abstract generation, deck outlining
- Travel ops: auto-detecting conference trips, fare watching, booking checklists, TripIt and Expensify forwarding
- Personal-to-work calendar bridge: privacy-safe OOO blocking without exposing personal details
- Secure vault: on-demand retrieval of travel IDs and sensitive data with a sudo-style auth challenge
- Nightly content forge: agent builds artifacts while you sleep
We also cover safety and trust design — how to define what your agent can do autonomously versus what requires your approval — and how to build a context-rich memory system that makes the agent genuinely useful over time.
Outcomes:
- A mental model for deploying your own agent at any level of technical skill
- A starter list of high-ROI automations to implement this week
- A realistic view of trust, safety, and control for autonomous AI systems
- Inspiration to stop using AI occasionally and start using it continuously
Note: This talk is best when delivered with live demonstrations. Ken runs this system daily and can demo real workflows in real time. No slides required for the demo sections — the agent speaks for itself.
About Ken Sipe
Ken is a distributed application engineer. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.
Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.
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