Bradley Axen

Most teams made a person the API between their agents and everyone else: copying the output into chat and pasting the reply back into the harness. This hands-on workshop shows the alternative: put the agents where the work is. We use Buzz, Block's open source, channel-driven workspace where people...

The hidden cost and engineering friction of maintaining fragmented infrastructure for customer-facing features slows your product velocity. As high-frequency data and intelligence become the core of the user experience, the traditional strategy of managing siloed operational and analytical stacks has shifted from a technical inconvenience to a strategic liability. For organizations that must ship faster while controlling infrastructure overhead, the path forward is a fundamental move toward consolidation. This tech industry session moves past the theory to provide a proven blueprint for architecting experiences built directly on a unified foundation. We will explore the shift from “integrated” to “built-on” and detail how to consolidate specialized databases, eliminate brittle data pipelines and use the lakehouse and Lakebase architectures to power user experiences at a fraction of the traditional engineering cost.

goose is an open source AI agent framework that allows anyone to connect language model output to real world action. Released in January by Block (the company made up of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and TIDAL), its use cases range from vibe coding to connecting all of the internal apps and services an enterprise uses. It can be powered by any language model that has tool calling capabilities.goose's modular design allows it to connect with any system through simple extensions. Built on the open Model Context Protocol (developed with Anthropic), goose transforms natural language into actions across various tools and services. Whether integrating with platforms like Jira and GitHub, or executing system commands and scripts, its plug-and-play architecture means anyone can extend Goose's capabilities to suit their needs.Finally, goose has both a command line interface and desktop app — it isn't limited to an IDE to start connecting to MCP servers and building powerful agentic workflows.

Generative AI has the potential to disrupt every industry, with many enterprises already investing in this space. However, building a differentiated generative AI solution requires companies to use their unique data and build a solution tailored to their domain.