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May 22, 2026

learning agency from AI Engineer Singapore

A retrospective on helping run a 1,000-person AI conference: what worked and lessons i learnt

This article is purely for my future self, for when I’m hosting something similar or wishing I had written these learnings down while they were still fresh in my head. So this is just an attempt to do that. Please feel free to read through it in case it helps you too.

nothing is “too big” to pull off. it’s just unstaffed (for now).

If you stand close enough to an event like this while it’s being built, you stop believing you need permission for genuinely anything. Especially as somebody in GTM, and having given a talk on literally being able to reach out to anybody you want, I truly believe the agency of who you want and what you want comes completely on you. All of the restrictions you think you have are arbitrary, invisible, and in your head. If you have structured opinions on why a thing should exist and why you are passionate about making it exist, and importantly, the patience to keep showing up for the boring parts, you’d have pulled it off.

knowing why it should exist + passion to make it exist + patience to show up for the boring parts = you eventually pull it off

reducing latency between “something interesting was said” and “it’s on X.”

As I mentioned on my LinkedIn posts, content logistics is 90% of the content itself. These are all learnings.

  • A person in charge of every aspect. Memory cards, file transfers, who films what, what gets posted first, what needs to be clipped immediately. All of these are insanely important. Everything sorted, someone designated to own each piece.
  • Train an LLM on the run of events and the speakers. Build a database that is very easy to pull information from, especially for live updates. So mid-event I can just be like, “hey, this is who this person is, this is what they talked about, can you give me a quote and a summary,” and not have to keep adding that information as and when it happens.

i usually don’t cry at tech events but

Justin Baird from Tesseract AI brought a woman with ALS onto the stage. They put an EEG headband on her, ran her neural signal into a robotic arm, and the arm painted. She was painting just by thinking about it. It was so incredibly moving and meaningful. Everyone cried. This is what I imagine AI to be used for in a utopian world, just for good, just for expanding the realm of possibility.

Justin Baird's ALS painting demo on stage at AI Engineer Singapore The painting created during the demo Group chat reactions after Justin's demo: 'i def teared up', 'i cried hahaha', 'it was amazing', 'i'm so emotional'

I will keep adding to this blog when I remember more learnings but tldr: what an event.