Ex Uno Plures: Agents for Everyone
Friday, April 17, 2026 · 10:20 AM – 10:50 AM · Auditorium 5
Every week, experience reports from the field about using agentic assistants shows people falling readily into a few camps, ranging from extreme skepticism to extreme fanaticism. But a vast gulf exists in between these two ends of the spectrum. How it is possible that some people obtain enormous productivity gains while others obtain strikingly negative productivity?
In this talk, I’ll offer up field observations that seem to explain this discrepancy, and we’ll share the practices that we’ve observed to be most effective across many teams at reducing it. We’ll also cover the most essential ingredients for success for individual practitioners operating in a team or enterprise setting, which we summarize as “ecosystem”, “engineering”, and “evaluation”. Using these three approaches, even inexperienced practitioners of agentic tooling can get many of the benefits, and improve their own engineering and technology skills along the way.
About the Speaker
John Feminella
SVP Technology, Syndetic
John Feminella is an avid technologist, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate. He helps enterprises transform the way they write, operate, and deploy software so that their businesses and people can be more effective. Before that, he led technology organizations at EY, Two Sigma, Pivotal, VMware, and ThoughtWorks; helped build the world's largest database of pollutants and air emissions; and authored a distributed-sensor technology. John lives in Charlottesville, VA and likes meta-jokes, milkshakes, and referring to himself in the third person in speaker bios.