Talks
Keynotes, conference sessions, and invited panels on agentic data engineering, AI-ready data platforms, and building data teams, at industry summits and universities. Where there is an event page or a recording, it is linked.
- Panel
Oct 30, 2026Step Inside the AI-Powered Enterprises
upcomingUSF Enterprise AI Summit, University of San FranciscoThe University of San Francisco's second Enterprise AI summit, on how leading companies use AI today and what comes next. On the panel with leaders from SurveyMonkey, Microsoft AI, Postman, and Solid. USF Downtown Campus, 2 to 5pm.
- Session
Oct 13–15, 2026Making a Data Platform AI-Ready
deliveredApplied AI SummitSemantic layers, retrieval, and automation: a roadmap for closing the AI-readiness gaps that matter.
- Session and discussion
Oct 5, 2026What's New: Zero to a Trusted Semantic Layer in Snowflake
deliveredSnowflake World Tour, Chicago, with Aniruth Narayanan, SnowflakeInvited by Snowflake to co-present on the Zendesk implementation: governed semantic views, Cortex Agent, MCP, and the internal analytics agent built on top of them.
- Session
Sep 15–18, 2026AI-Powered Data Development: How Agentic SDLC & dbt-MCP Transformed Our Data Engineering Workflow
delivereddbt Summit 2026, Las VegasThe skills-driven agentic workflow behind roughly 2.5× faster analytics delivery at Zendesk.
- Keynote
Aug 29, 2026Unlocking Intelligence through Data
deliveredIEEE 5th World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing (AIC 2026)A practitioner's maturity model for AI-ready data, from ground data to agentic-ready platforms.
- Address
Guest address to the graduating class, MS in Data Science & AI
deliveredUniversity of San Francisco - Podcast
Feb 5, 2021
Publications
- Vision Paper: contextctl — Auditable, Open-Source Context Infrastructure for AI Agents1st IEEE Big Data Workshop on Agentic AI for Big Data (AAI-BD 2026), IEEE BigData 2026.Submitted Oct 26, 2026. Under review, decision expected November 12, 2026. Preprint PDF
- Essential PySpark for Scalable Data AnalyticsTechnical reviewer. Packt Publishing, ISBN 978-1-800563094.Published
Community
Judging, mentoring, and technical interviewing.
- Judge
Oct 23–25, 2026
- Judge
Aug 15–16, 2026 - Mentor
OngoingJunior and mid-level engineers moving into data and AI engineering, US and Singapore20–30 professionals mentored across enterprises; public live sessions on YouTube
Press kit
Bios and headshots for organizers, hosts, and editors. Use as-is.
Ayan Putatunda is a Staff Data Engineer at Zendesk and an IEEE Senior Member, leading AI-readiness work for the Zendesk Data Platform. He gave the keynote at the 2026 IEEE World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing and has spoken at Snowflake World Tour, dbt Summit, and the Applied AI Summit.
Ayan Putatunda is a Staff Data Engineer at Zendesk, where he leads AI-readiness work for the Zendesk Data Platform: semantic layers and skills-driven agentic data engineering, with roughly 2.5× faster time-to-production. He co-authored the contextctl vision paper, which proposes auditable, open-source context infrastructure for AI agents; it is under review at the AAI-BD 2026 workshop at IEEE BigData 2026, with a decision expected November 12, 2026. His work across Zendesk, Achieve, Noodle.ai, and Cognizant includes petabyte-scale platforms, 500K+ unified customer profiles, and a data engineering team grown from 2 to 8 with 100% retention. He gave the keynote at IEEE AIC 2026, co-presented at Snowflake World Tour Chicago (Oct 2026) at Snowflake's invitation, has spoken at dbt Summit 2026 and the Applied AI Summit, and teaches on the Built from Bits channel. He is an IEEE Senior Member and holds an M.S. in Data Science from UIUC.
