Rachel Sibande
Senior Program Officer of Artificial Intelligence
Gates Foundation
I have over 20 years experience managing digital development programs in 22 countries in Africa including Nepal, Haiti and Colombia. I currently lead the Africa Artificial Intelligence Scaling hubs initiative, scaling AI solutions in public health, agriculture and education in Africa. I have also shaped and deployed digital solutions for monitoring general elections in 8 African countries since 2014. I established Malawi's first technology hub and incubator; mHub. The hub is an incubator for innovators and emerging entrepreneurs.The hub provides investment readiness support and financing to emerging entrepreneurs. The hub also develops technology solutions for diverse clients. I am a Google Scholar and an inventor of a thermal chemical process for powering rural mini grids.
Conference Sessions
- Keynote: Rachel Sibande, Gates Foundation & Steven Wanyee, Africa Digital Health Networks 19 Nov 2026 • 09:07-09:22 Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Carl Ross
Member of Technical Staff
OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff @ OpenAI
Conference Sessions
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Keynote: Agentic E2E Software Factories with MCP
20 Nov 2026 • 09:43-09:53
Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Over the last few months we at OpenAI have been developing internal case studies on E2E software factories driven entirely by agents and following the constraints of: 1. No Token budgets — leveraging100+m tokens per minute of GPT 5.5 Pro 2. No human intervention — granting full production authority to agents 3. Complete K8/Open source hermeticism As the original implementing team of MCP at OpenAI we have heavily utilized it is a a broad interface for these agents to take a degree of control on the software development process beyond simply coding. Agents: – Collaborate on proposals – Implement and review code – Oversee testing and qualification – Control the entire promotion and release process – Perform active monitoring and remediation in production All through MCP layers on top of observability and release stacks. This talk aims to help show what breaks, where the remaining gaps are, and where strong areas to focus are once tokens are not a concern.
Steven Wanyee
Deputy Chairperson
Africa Digital Health Networks (ADHN)
Conference Sessions
- Keynote: Rachel Sibande, Gates Foundation & Steven Wanyee, Africa Digital Health Networks 19 Nov 2026 • 09:07-09:22 Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Angie Jones
Vice President
Agentic AI Foundation
Angie Jones is Vice President of the Agentic AI Foundation where she guides how agentic systems are designed, implemented, and adopted across the global developer ecosystem. Angie is an award-winning teacher and international keynote speaker who shares her wealth of knowledge at software companies and conferences all over the world. As a Master Inventor, Angie is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in more than 25 patented inventions in the areas of virtual worlds, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet, and software development processes.
Conference Sessions
- Welcome & Opening Remarks 19 Nov 2026 • 09:00-09:05 Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
- Keynote: Welcome Back 20 Nov 2026 • 09:00-09:05 Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Sam Morrow
Staff Software Engineer
GitHub
Sam is a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub, where he leads development of the GitHub MCP server. He works on AI developer tools and helps shape agentic workflows at GitHub. In a past life he was also a professional drummer.
Conference Sessions
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Keynote: Translating MCP
20 Nov 2026 • 09:07-09:22
Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Internationalisation has been a major gap in the modelcontextprotocol, with the vast majority of servers only targeting English. This gap excludes much of the world from a first class agent experience. Finally this is being resolved, this session will explain why it is needed, how to ship this in MCP servers and clients, what parts should be translated and the footguns and gotchas to avoid. As well as implementation, there will also be a demo showing how it works in practice, and advice on leveraging AI for initial translations when you are getting started. This is something we can and should solve to make MCP more inclusive, and truly global.
Jerry Ochieng Anyumba
Team Lead
Jarida / Goose In A Pond
Jerry Ochieng Anyumba is a backend engineer and AI enthusiast based in Nairobi, Kenya, and the team lead of Jarida, a five-person collective of Catholic University of Eastern Africa graduates. He leads Goose In A Pond, a fully offline, privacy-first smart home AI built on Block's open-source Goose agent framework, which won one of Block's $100K Goose grants for pushing agentic AI off the desktop and into the home. Jerry previously trained an on-device model to translate Kenyan Sign Language into English. He and the Jarida team are mentored by Obinna Anya, Senior UX Researcher at Google, and Harold Nyikal, Android Growth Lead at Google Kenya.
Conference Sessions
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Keynote: Democratizing AI with Goose In A Pond
20 Nov 2026 • 09:25-09:40
Regency Ballroom A-C (16th Floor)
Most "smart" home assistants aren't smart about your privacy, your connectivity, or your wallet. They need a live connection to someone else's cloud, ship your voice to a data center you'll never see, and go quiet the moment your internet does. Goose In A Pond is the alternative: a fully local, privacy-first smart home assistant our team built on Goose, AAIF's open-source AI agent framework and MCP client. Every part of it, voice recognition, language understanding, memory, device control, runs on hardware you can hold in your hand, like an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano (it even runs on a Raspberry Pi 5). Nothing leaves the house. And because it's built on an open agent, it's yours to inspect, extend, and improve, not licensed to you by a vendor who can change the terms whenever they want. In this talk, I'll share what it actually took for a five-person team to build a smart home AI that holds its own against commercial cloud assistants, including in the low-connectivity conditions those products quietly assume away. You'll see how we taught Goose to listen for its own name, control everything from bulbs to devices with no API at all, and get better over time without ever phoning home, plus the MCP extensions we're open-sourcing so anyone in the Goose community can build their own pond. Because democratizing AI shouldn't just mean cheaper access to someone else's cloud. It should mean that anyone, anywhere, with an idea and a dev board, can build something that's genuinely theirs.
