​SF Bay Area AI Conference Built on Real Vendor + Customer Stories

​Pairs By the Bay is a vendor + customer conference format in which each talk is co-presented by a pair: a vendor and design partners, PoCs, or production customers, or an open-source maintainer and a production user, so attendees get the why and the how.
From orchestration to MCP, from human-in-the-loop to auditability: see how teams in real industries ship compliant, observable, production-grade AI stacks—together.

​What is Pairs By the Bay?

​Pairs By the Bay is an innovative conference format where each talk is presented by two partners.

​The most impactful format is Vendor+Customer (VC).

​The customer motivates the problem, and the vendor solves it in a generalizable way. For instance, a bank may require a complex compliance flow based on a user’s actions, and an MCP vendor might set up a complex orchestration where an agentic systems reacts to those actions in an auditable and compliant way, with alerting and observability and human in the loop as required.

​The first Pairs By the Bay event will be held in the San Francisco Bay Area in April 2025.

​If you are a technology vendor, such as a startup with a platform or a set of tools, and have design partners, PoCs, or customers in production, you can show how your solution applies to those kinds of customers, their industry, or business at large. You can partner with other startups to bring OSS AI stacks to customers and developers.

​If you are a customer of tech companies, you can showcase your business needs so that more leading AI partners can work with you, giving you an edge in the fast-paced disruption era. You can also put together whole stacks, such as composing an OSS AI stack for end-to-end agentic workflows. You can hire developers who will work with the new stack on your end.

​Who Should Attend?

​We invite enterprise developers—Software Engineers, AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, DevOps/MLOps, Knowledge Engineers, Engineering Leaders, Researchers, and Product Managers—from Fortune 500 companies and top startups. This keeps the audience high quality: people who are actively building and shipping, and who you can actually learn from (and hire, partner with, or sell to).

​The space is limited, and attendance is application-based. If you’re accepted, you’ll receive a registration link to purchase a ticket.

​Who can speak at Pairs By the Bay?

​Anyone can apply, but we’re especially excited to hear from customers and production users.

​Pairs By the Bay is a vendor + customer (or OSS maintainer + production user) format where each talk is co-presented by a pair—so the audience gets the why (the real business/engineering problem) and the how (the implementation and reusable patterns).

​Here are the main speaker paths:

​Customers / production users: Bring the problem. Share the real constraints (compliance, security, auditability, latency, data quality, org realities), what success looks like, and what you needed from partners. This helps attract the right vendors, OSS maintainers, and builders to work with you.

​Vendors / tool builders: Bring a customer, design partner, PoC, or production user and show how you solved the problem in a way that generalizes to similar teams and industries.

​OSS maintainers + production users: Maintainers share the design and roadmap; users share how it runs in production, what broke, and what they changed to make it reliable.

​“Free Radicals” (solo talks): We accept 20-minute submissions from a single speaker presenting a concrete technical solution—especially if you’re looking to meet users/customers and we can help match you.

​I’m a vendor — how do I sponsor Pairs By the Bay?

​Sponsorship is designed to turn into real conversations with customers and production users.

​Here’s how it works:

​Apply as a sponsor/design partner. Tell us what you build, your ideal customer profile, and the kinds of production problems you want to showcase (or solve with a pair).

​Bring a pair (best path). Sponsors are encouraged to submit a Vendor + Customer (or OSS Maintainer + Production User) session so you’re on stage with proof, not promises.

​We can help match you. If you don’t have a customer ready, you can sponsor and submit a Free Radical 20-minute talk, and we’ll try to connect you with relevant users/customers in the audience.

​What sponsors typically get:

​Brand presence (website, signage, and program materials)

​Stage time via pair talks (and/or a Free Radical slot)

​Introductions to relevant customers/users when possible

​VIP dinner access for sponsor reps (if you want this as a benefit, add it)

​Next step: Email [email protected] with (1) your company + what you ship, (2) 1–2 target industries/use cases, (3) whether you have a customer/user partner, and (4) the best contact for sponsorship.