If you're passionate about AI, Data, or anything tech-related, this is your chance to plug into the Durban community and share real knowledge. We're calling on developers, architects, data engineers, AI practitioners, recruiters, founders, students, and innovators to step onto the stage and deliver insights that inspire.

New to us? AI Unplugged was about stripping away the hype to find what's real. Plugged In is the next step: getting connected. The tools that change your working day. The industry that's hiring. The community that shows up. That's the energy we're after on stage: real knowledge, told straight, with something worth saying.

🔥 Why Should You Speak?

• Share your expertise with over 200 passionate attendees from across the AI, data, and developer communities. 
• Expand your network by connecting with fellow industry leaders and innovators.
• Contribute to the growth of the local Data and AI/ML community. 
• Elevate your personal brand and thought leadership.
• Be part of the first GitHub Copilot Dev Days ever held in Durban.

🎯 What We're Looking For

The theme is Plugged In: honest, practical, no-hype tech talks that connect people to tools, to the industry, and to each other. We want sessions that show what actually works in the real world, share lessons learned (failures included!), and give our audience skills they can use on Monday morning. Think "here's what actually works" over "here's a 47-slide deck about a product roadmap."

This event has two tracks. You can submit to either one, or to both. Just select the track when you submit.

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⚡ TRACK 1: THE MAINS

Our core track, running the full day. Sessions are organised into three strands:

🔌 Earthed: doing it properly

Anyone can generate. Not everyone can build. This strand is about the unglamorous work that makes AI trustworthy.

• AI testing and evaluation: how do you actually know the thing works?
• Preventing the slop: guardrails, quality gates, and catching the confidently wrong answer
• AI in CI/CD: pipelines, automation, and shipping AI-assisted code safely
• Code review and quality in an AI-assisted team- Responsible AI, bias, fairness, governance: the stuff that actually matters
• Cybersecurity: because every developer and data professional needs to think about this

🚪 Ways In: getting into the room, and staying in it

Our audience asked for this louder than anything else, and roughly half of every room we fill is a student or recent graduate. This strand gets serious weight this time.

• Getting real with AI: how do you actually use it to land a tech job?-
• Prepping newcomers and the youth: what to learn, in what order, and what to ignore
• Starting something of your own: entrepreneurship, side projects, and building a business
• Personal branding, portfolios, and community presence
• Hiring, interviewing, and what the other side of the table is really looking for
• Career pivots and levelling up

If you hire people, if you've made the jump yourself, or if you've built something from nothing in this economy, we want you in this strand.

🔋 Full Current: the Data & AI spine

The technical depth our community already turns up for, plus the deeper data focus they asked for.

• Building AI agents and agentic workflows (the practical way)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): connecting AI to the real world
• Getting real with generative AI and RAG: what works, what doesn't, and what's overhyped
• Small language models and running AI locally
• AI for Africa: unique use cases, challenges, and opportunities on our continent - Microsoft Fabric: data engineering, OneLake, lakehouses, analytics, and BI
• Database Development: performance, architecture, and modern database tech (because SQL is not dead, and we'll fight anyone who says otherwise)
• Streaming Data & Real-Time Analytics: Kafka, Event Hubs, Spark, Flink, and data in motion
• Power Platform & Power Apps: making AI accessible to business users
• Dev craft: .NET, DevOps, platform engineering, and API design 
• Real-world AI & Data use cases: because theory is great, but practice is better

💡 Got a topic that doesn't fit neatly into a strand? Submit it anyway! Some of our best sessions have come from unexpected places. We'll find it a home.

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🎬 TRACK 2: LIVE TAKES — GITHUB COPILOT DEV DAYS

For the first time in Durban, we're hosting GitHub Copilot Dev Days: a global, in-person, community-led initiative running from 1 September to 31 October 2026, bringing developers and local tech communities together to explore GitHub Copilot through practical, real-world experiences.

We're running it as live, demo-led sessions. The name says it: Live Takes — watch it get built, unedited.

What we want here:

• Real GitHub Copilot workflows in the Copilot app and the CLI
• Live building on real repositories, not sanitised demo projects
• Copilot agents, custom instructions, skills, and how you actually configure them
• Copilot in the review, testing, and CI/CD loop
• Honest limits: where it helps, where it gets in the way, and what you had to fix afterwards

What we don't want here: a slide deck about what Copilot could theoretically do. This track is a hands-on-keyboard track. If the demo can't survive being run live, it isn't a Live Take.

Two important notes for Dev Days submitters:

1. This track is specifically about GitHub Copilot. General AI-coding talks (Claude Code, Cursor, open-source agents, etc.) are very welcome; submit them to The Mains. 
2. We can't guarantee every attendee has a Copilot licence. Design your session so people can follow along if they have access, and still get full value if they're watching. We'll tell attendees to bring a laptop if they have one, but nobody should be stranded.

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🌟 First-Time Speakers: Yes, That Means YOU

Some of the most memorable talks at our events have come from first-time speakers. If you've been thinking about getting on stage but haven't found the right opportunity, this is it. Nobody was born knowing this stuff; every speaker on our stage started with a first talk.

We provide:

• A supportive, encouraging audience (seriously, our community is amazing) 
• The option to do a 20-minute lightning talk if a 50-minute session feels daunting 
• A platform that has launched dozens of speaking careers - You don't need to be an expert. You need to have something worth sharing.

Students and recent graduates: the Ways In strand was built for the room you're in.

⚡ Ready to Plug In?

Hit that Submit Session button and join us on stage at Data & AI Community Day Durban: Plugged In.

The tools are here. The jobs are here. The people are here. Come get connected.

See you in Durban!

One day. Three ways to plug in. Zero hype.