(AAIF Chicago) The State of AI: From Hype to Production-Ready Agentic Systems
(An AAIF Chicago community event) AI is moving fast—from generating content and answering questions to reasoning, orchestrating workflows, and taking action. But as AI becomes more autonomous, a bigger question emerges: Are we ready to engineer, trust, and operate these systems in the real world? Join Arunava (Ron) Majumdar, Founder & CEO of Research Net.ai and Open Development Platform, and former Head of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies (USA), for a practical look at the State of AI and the rise of agentic systems. With 28+ years of experience across enterprise architecture, AI, modernization, research, and software engineering, Arunava will explore what happens when we move beyond AI experimentation toward production-ready agentic systems.
What we'll explore:
🤖 The Rise of Agentic AI How AI is evolving from generating responses to reasoning, orchestrating, and acting.
🧠 Beyond the LLM Hallucinations, model drift, generalization, RAG, continuous learning, and human oversight.
🔐 Trust, Privacy & Security What changes when AI systems have access to data, tools, and enterprise workflows?
💰 The Economics of AI Understanding inference costs and the implications of always-on agentic systems.
🌱 The Sustainability Question Exploring the infrastructure and energy implications of scaling AI.
⚙️ Engineering for Production Why observability, orchestration, testing, DevOps, security, and reusable patterns matter as agents move into production.
🌐 Open Innovation & Collaboration How researchers, builders, academia, and industry can collaborate to accelerate responsible AI innovation.
Why attend?
This isn't just a conversation about what AI can do. It's about understanding what it takes to build AI systems that can operate responsibly and effectively in the real world. Come with your questions, challenges, and perspectives—and join the conversation about where agentic AI is heading next.
🎤 About the Speaker :
Arunava (Ron) Majumdar Founder & CEO, Research Net.ai & Open Development Platform Former Head, IBM Center for Advanced Studies (USA) Arunava has led architecture, design, development, and deployment across 50+ projects with 40+ Fortune 500 organizations and has spearheaded academic research initiatives with universities including Northwestern and the University of Chicago. He is also actively involved in Chicago's AI and technology ecosystem through AI Camp, AITP Chicago, AI Alliance, IBM Open Innovation Community, and academic mentoring. NSHM-State of AI.pdf Come explore the State of AI—and what it will take to move from AI experimentation to agentic systems we can actually build, operate, and trust.