Talks
Keynotes and sessions on agentic data engineering, AI-ready data platforms, and building data teams. Each talk links to the event page or recording.
- Session
Oct 13–15, 2026Making a Data Platform AI-Ready
upcomingApplied AI SummitSemantic layers, retrieval, and automation: a roadmap for closing the AI-readiness gaps that matter.
- Session
Sep 15–18, 2026AI-Powered Data Development: How Agentic SDLC & dbt-MCP Transformed Our Data Engineering Workflow
delivereddbt Summit 2026, Las Vegas, with Suhas JangoanThe 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 AgentsAyan Putatunda, Suhas Jangoan. 1st IEEE Big Data Workshop on Agentic AI for Big Data (AAI-BD 2026), IEEE BigData 2026.Under review, decision expected October 2026. Preprint PDF
- Essential PySpark for Scalable Data AnalyticsTechnical reviewer. Packt Publishing, ISBN 978-1-800563094.Published
Community
Judging, mentoring, and technical interviewing.
- 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 - Technical interviewer
Ongoing50+ technical interviews as a coding assessorAcross enterprises
Press kit
Bios and headshots for organizers, hosts, and editors. Use as-is.
Ayan Putatunda is a Staff Data Engineer at Zendesk, leading AI-readiness work for the Zendesk Data Platform. With 16+ years in data and AI platforms, he keynoted the 2026 IEEE World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing and speaks at 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 that delivers roughly 2.5× faster time-to-production. His research with Suhas Jangoan, contextctl, proposes auditable, open-source context infrastructure for AI agents and is under review at IEEE BigData 2026. Over 16+ years across Zendesk, Achieve, Noodle.ai, and Cognizant he has built petabyte-scale platforms, unified 500K+ customer profiles, and grown a data engineering team from 2 to 8 with 100% retention. He keynoted IEEE AIC 2026, speaks at dbt Summit 2026 and the Applied AI Summit, co-authored the contextctl vision paper, and teaches on the Built from Bits channel. He holds an M.S. in Data Science from UIUC.
