AI Engineering in Practice: Governance, Sovereignty & Real-World Value
Join us for another Wellington AI Engineering Meetup!
This time, we're bringing together three speakers to explore what it takes to make AI work in the real world — from governing and observing AI agents, to making the case for AI investment, to running sovereign models locally.
Expect practical engineering insights, real-world experience, and plenty of opportunities to connect with Wellington's AI engineering community.
Whether you're an AI engineer, software developer, architect, engineering leader, or simply curious about where AI is heading, we'd love to see you there!
And as always, there'll be pizza, drinks, and great conversations.
Venue & Community Support
Hnry — Level 2, 45 Johnston Street, Wellington Central
A huge thank you to Hnry, especially Sammie Price, for generously hosting us again and continuing to support Wellington's engineering community.
And a big shoutout to Younity, especially Joel Norris, for generously providing the food and drinks as their continued support of our AI engineering community!
We really appreciate both teams helping bring our AI engineering community together.
Organisers
Lingxian Kong — Principal Engineer at ASB Bank
Suhel Mangera — AI Product & Strategy Consultant
Agenda
Thursday, 5 November 2026
5:15 PM — Doors open & networking
5:30 PM — Talk 1 from Xiaodi Yan
6:00 PM — Pizza, drinks & networking
6:20 PM — Talk 2 from Susannah Jackson
6:40 PM — Talk 3 from Miles Thompson
Talk 1 — AI Agent Governance and Observability in Practice
Xiaodi Yan | Lead Engineer at Kiwibank & Microsoft MVP
Building AI agents that work in production takes more than just getting good answers. How do you make sure agents follow the rules, use the right tools, and give you enough visibility when something goes wrong?
In this practical talk, Xiaodi will explore AI agent governance and observability through a hands-on demo. He'll show how to control tool access, trace agent activity, connect logs with traces, and investigate policy decisions and runtime failures.
About Xiaodi
Xiaodi Yan is a Lead Engineer at Kiwibank and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2015. He also organises the Wellington .NET User Group and regularly shares his experience in .NET, Azure, DevOps, and AI engineering.
Talk 2 — Where AI Value Lives: Architecture, Objective, and Cost in Government
Susannah Jackson | Solution Consultant at ServiceNow
AI projects don't always fall short because the technology fails. Often, the real challenge is making sure the technical architecture, business objectives, and costs all line up.
Using a fictional government agency scenario, Susannah will explore how documenting architectural decisions can help organisations demonstrate the real value of AI. She'll also explain why the ongoing cost of running AI needs to be weighed against the outcomes it delivers before claiming genuine savings.
About Susannah
Susannah Jackson is a Solution Consultant at ServiceNow, working with public sector, tertiary, and enterprise customers across New Zealand. With over 20 years of enterprise architecture experience in the NZ public sector, she focuses on connecting technical decisions with measurable business outcomes.
Talk 3 — Local Models, Sovereign AI & Agentic Governance
Miles Thompson | AI Engineer at Cyborg Garden
Do we always need to rely on large, externally hosted AI models? What if running models locally could give us more control over our data, costs, and how AI systems behave?
Miles will explore the benefits and trade-offs of local AI models, including data sovereignty, transparency, and governance. Drawing on his experience training and hosting bilingual speech models for the Papa Reo API, he'll also discuss runtime governance for AI agents and what the future of sovereign AI and local hosting could look like in Aotearoa New Zealand.
About Miles
Miles Thompson is an AI engineer currently working on local AI agents and agentic governance at Cyborg Garden. Previously a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Te Hiku Media, he helped develop and self-host the bilingual speech models behind the Papa Reo API. He has also presented at leading AI conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI.