Talk Proposal: Build production-ready ambient agents using Drasi and Dapr Agents

[JeffreyJPZ]

• Draft Title: Build production-ready ambient agents using Drasi and Dapr Agents
• Length:
  • Lighting talk/Demo (10 min)
  • Full Presentation (20 min)
• Links: (slides, article, notes)
  • Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rBnuK_5cbMXJsEhsDCgVJ-0RMbUIE-LPx1ZB6uvM3Xg/edit?usp=sharing
  • Blog posts:
    • https://www.jeffreyjpz.com/blog/01-gsoc-intro/
    • https://www.jeffreyjpz.com/blog/02-gsoc-midterm/
  • Demo: https://github.com/JeffreyJPZ/dapr-agents/tree/drasi-trigger/examples/ext-drasi-change-driven-agents-k8s
• Which dates, particularly Tue/Wed/Thu during the 3rd/4th week of a month, are you likely available? (e.g. "Most Thursdays with 4 weeks notice", "June or later", etc.)
  • Interested in the upcoming June event if possible: https://luma.com/cloudnativevan?e=evt-ZdE20lTDAfgxdGQ
• Short Summary of your talk:

  • While AI agents may work well enough for local demos, moving to long-running autonomous agents that interact with other services (internal microservices, third party APIs, etc.) raises problems of scalability, security, durability, resiliency, auditability, and governance, especially in highly-regulated industries. Triggering these workflows when complex business conditions are met is another problem — internal services and third-party providers not be equipped to provide the context necessary for agents, and data is often spread across multiple sources which makes custom change processing pipelines challenging to maintain.

  • In this talk, I'll give a brief overview of the "high-level" change detection capabilities of Drasi and the microservices APIs provided by Dapr, how they address the mentioned problems, and how they can be combined to help developers and operators build change-driven, "ambient" agents declaratively. I'll walk through a live demo showing how Dapr Agents can be triggered from Drasi "business events" in a Kubernetes environment, thanks to Dapr Agents' inherent support for asynchronous messaging and event-driven workflows. Lastly, I'll give a sneak peek at the upcoming work for the Google Summer of Code project as the focus shifts from purely reactive agents to autonomous, proactive agents.

Speaker Bio

• Name: Jeffrey Zhang
• Mini-bio: Jeffrey is a Computer Science student at the University of British Columbia. He is currently working on the CNCF Graduated project Dapr and the CNCF Sandbox project Drasi as part of Google Summer of Code 2026.
• Picture for slides: (We use this pictures to create promotional content and to present your talk in our socials.)
  • https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a6a6443d-f58c-4829-97a8-f0e6575637e2
• Would you like help with your presentation? (Feedback on notes, content?)
• Social media link(s): (twitter, website, linkedin, etc.)
  • Website/blog: https://jeffreyjpz.com/
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-zhang-b18b0b280/
• Do you agree to the [CNCF Code of Conduct](https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md)?
  • I agree

[frozenprocess]

Hi @JeffreyJPZ ,
We've got an event lined up for July 23rd, would that date work for you?

[JeffreyJPZ]

Hi @frozenprocess,
Yes, that could work. My email is jeffreyjpizhang@gmail.com, feel free to reach out there.

[JeffreyJPZ]

Hi @frozenprocess, @ShankyJS,

Is there any update on this? Not sure if there's anything I need to do on my side.

[ShankyJS]

Hey @JeffreyJPZ, sorry I sent you a message on Linkedin this morning, didn't see that you gave us your email here,

Just wanted to confirm that your talk is been accepted and you are part of our agenda for July 23rd, please update which picture would you like us to use for our media resources as the linked attached to the issue is not working on my end.

[JeffreyJPZ]

@ShankyJS just FYI, I updated the picture + some other links.

[ShankyJS]

Thanks @JeffreyJPZ your talk has been announced