Wellington AI Engineering Meetup — April 2026

​The agentic AI wave keeps building! This month we're hearing from two builders shipping products in very different domains: maritime intelligence and beauty e-commerce. Different industries, different users, same hard problems: how do you actually build agentic systems that work in production, and what does a modern agentic development workflow look like in 2026?

​Tim from Starboard Maritime Intelligence walks us through how their team approaches agentic development workflows. The tooling, the iteration loops, and what it actually takes day to day. Then Madeleine from Delightable shares what she's learned building an agentic AI shopping assistant that turns real customer conversations into marketing intelligence for beauty brands. The product decisions, the surprises, and what "agentic" really means when your agent is talking to actual customers.

​Grab a drink, settle in, and come learn from people doing the work. See you there.

​Talks

​Tim McDermott — "Agentic Development Workflows at Starboard" Starboard Maritime Intelligence delivers actionable maritime domain awareness worldwide. Its AI-driven platform fuses multi-source data into a unified operational picture, helping governments, defence agencies, and infrastructure operators predict threats, prevent incidents, and strengthen maritime security and resilience across global waters. Tim takes us inside their agentic development workflows. How the team builds, tests, and iterates using agentic engineering for a product that needs to operate reliably in a complex, data-rich domain. What does the dev loop actually look like? What breaks? What did they have to rethink?  Starboard Maritime Intelligence

​Madeleine Patel — "Building an Agentic AI Product for E-Commerce" Delightable turns customer conversations into intelligence for beauty brand marketers through a virtual shopping assistant. Madeleine shares the experience of building an agentic AI product from the ground up. The product thinking, the architecture choices, how they started with AI and where they ended up, and what happens when your agent is customer facing and every scaling decision has a pay-off. What does it take to deliver true value using ML and agentic ecommerce tools, and what did the team learn along the way?  Delightable

​Sponsors

​​🏢 Venue — Hnry — Best venue in town!

​​🍕 Drinks/Food — Younity — Shoutout to 🔗 Joel Norris for being a legend and supporting the AI Meetup!