AI as a Teammate, The AI Runtime Boston
Past event

AI as a Teammate

  • Tuesday, June 16, 2026
  • Doors 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

An evening for people building, shipping, and scaling with AI. Two practitioners on AI as a teammate. Nirmal Jingar (Wayfair) on the productivity gains from embedding AI in daily engineering workflows. Ananya Shah (Cartesian) on the patterns for collaborative AI that work for whole teams, not just individuals.

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Presenters

Who shared what

Nirmal Jingar
Nirmal Jingar
AI Engineering Executive · Wayfair
Talk

AI as a Teammate: Driving Double-Digit Engineering Productivity Gains

AI is no longer just a tool for automation. It is becoming an active teammate in the software development lifecycle. By embedding AI into daily workflows, teams can reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, accelerate code reviews, and improve decision quality through faster access to context and insights. This talk explores how treating AI as a collaborative partner, rather than a passive assistant, drives measurable efficiency gains while maintaining code quality and engineering rigor.

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Ananya Shah
Ananya Shah
AI Strategist & Consultant · Cartesian
Talk

Beyond the Private Chatbot: Bringing AI to Collaborative Work

AI has reshaped individual productivity. We write, research, code, and ramp up faster than ever. But collaborative workflows haven't kept pace. Teams still run on pre-AI processes while each person builds richer context inside their own private chatbot. The result is a paradox: individuals get more capable as shared context grows more fragmented. This talk explores the practical patterns for building collaborative AI systems through shared skills, context design, and team-level workflow changes that make AI useful for the whole organization, not just one person.

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Speaker profile →
Agenda
  1. 6:00 PM Doors open · informal mingling
  2. 6:30 PM Welcome, Kranthi Manchikanti
  3. 6:35 PM Talk 1 · Nirmal Jingar, AI as a Teammate
  4. 7:15 PM Talk 2 · Ananya Shah, Beyond the Private Chatbot
  5. 7:55 PM Open discussion · networking
  6. 8:30 PM Close
Recap

What happened

A full room for two talks on making AI a genuine teammate. Nirmal Jingar (Wayfair) walked through the operating model for embedding AI in daily engineering work, and Ananya Shah (Cartesian) made the case that collaborative AI, shared skills and a live context layer, is the next frontier after the private chatbot. Pizza, a Boston skyline, and a packed room of practitioners. Photos below.

  • Nirmal Jingar Treat AI as a teammate embedded in the daily engineering workflow, not a side tool. The productivity gain comes from an operating model for how a team hands work to and from AI.
  • Ananya Shah Individual AI use is racing ahead while shared team context fragments inside private chatbots. The unlock is collaborative patterns, shared skills and a live context layer the whole team reads from, not just one person.

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