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AI Talks: Event-Driven Agentic AI and Robotics Reality Check

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Solace
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What to expect

Join NYC's thriving AI community for an evening of cutting-edge technical talks exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and event-driven architecture. Hosted at Vellum AI's downtown Manhattan office and sponsored by Solace, this meetup brings together founders, engineers, and creatives interested in the practical applications of AI technology.

This monthly gathering features two deep-dive presentations examining critical challenges in modern AI development. First, Leah Robert, Principal Sales Engineer at Solace, presents "Why Agentic AI Needs to be Event Driven"—exploring how event-driven architecture provides the connectivity, scalability, and resiliency necessary for enterprise-grade AI agent deployments. As organizations increasingly build AI assistants to automate manual tasks and interface with data, the challenge shifts from creation to integration: how do you enable multiple agents across different environments to communicate effectively? Leah, who holds a degree in Software Design from Queen's University, brings extensive expertise in enterprise integration to answer this question.

The second talk, "Robotics in AI" by Lee Gaul, takes a critical look at embodied AI and challenges the hype around humanoid robotics. Drawing from examples like the Robot Olympics and viral robot demonstrations, Lee argues that most showcases rely on teleoperation and carefully controlled conditions rather than genuine physical intelligence. The presentation examines why large language models aren't equipped to solve the fundamental problems of affordance reasoning, grounded perception, and real-time physical inference—and what architectures we'll actually need for true physical-world AI agents. Lee, an AI advisor and speaker with a philosophy background from the University of Windsor, brings over a decade of tech industry experience to this thoughtful analysis.

What to expect: Technical presentations suitable for both AI practitioners and curious newcomers, followed by extended networking time with speakers and fellow attendees. No technical background required—just bring your interest in AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Midjourney. Complimentary food and drinks provided throughout the evening.

Who should attend: Founders building AI-powered products, software engineers working with AI s

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