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Sam
Lightstone
Distinguished Engineer
Airbnb
Sam is a technology executive with over 30 years of experience in research and development of data systems and artificial intelligence. He previously served as Chief Technology Officer for Artificial Intelligence at IBM. Heā€™s currently Distinguished Engineer for systems infrastructure at Airbnb. He was the senior engineer globally for operational data systems at Facebook which is one of the largest server fleets in the world. He is cofounder of the IEEE Workgroup on Self-Managing Database Systems. Sam holds more than 70 patents and has authored 4 books and over 40 academic papers. Samā€™s books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. In his spare time he is an avid guitar player and fencer. His Twitter handle is "samlightstone".
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12 November 2026 16:00 - 16:30
Your agent is doing what you didn't ask
The primary bottleneck in agentic AI is no longer capability. It's entropy. When agents "do what you didn't ask," it is rarely the result of a bad prompt. It's that agents fill gaps with assumptions, leading to silent failures that users eventually stop checking. This session breaks down the design discipline required to move from experimental demos to production-grade reliability. We will examine why "no design" is worse than "bad design," and why human-in-the-loop only works when humans run tasks independently rather than merely validating agent output.