Call for Speakers

Boston Data and AI Saturday 2026

Call for Speakers is closed. Submissions are no longer possible. Sorry.
in 4 months

Boston Data and AI Saturday 2026

event date

3 Oct 2026

location

5 Wayside Road Burlington, Massachusetts, United States


The Boston Data and AI Saturday event will be hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center in Burlington, MA.

This global, community-driven initiative offers a free day of technical training for Information Technology speakers and professionals, covering a wide range of subjects including SQL Server, Artificial Intelligence, Career & Professional Growth, Data Science, Analytics & Data Engineering, and more.


Code of Conduct for Boston Data and AI Saturday.

finished 8 days ago
Call for Speakers
Call opens at 12:00 AM

16 Apr 2026

Call closes at 11:59 PM

31 May 2026

Call closes in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-04:00) timezone.
Closing time in your timezone () is .

This is an in-person event.

We are now accepting submissions for one-hour, regular session talks. We welcome topics across the entire Microsoft Data Platform, with a strong focus on how modern data technologies and AI are converging.

We assume that robust security and governance are not separate disciplines but are fundamental components of every topic. Submissions should reflect this principle, demonstrating how to build solutions that are not only powerful but also secure and well-managed.

Share your knowledge on subjects such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: From foundational models to building intelligent, AI-driven applications.
  •  Unified Analytics & Data Engineering: Best practices for using Microsoft Fabric, and defining the role of SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Cosmos DB in the age of AI.
  • Advanced Data Science: Techniques and methodologies that drive business value.
  • SQL Server, Managed Instance, AzureSQL Hyperscale, PostgreSQL, CosmosDB
  • Career & Professional Growth: Leadership, personal branding (speaking, blogging), networking, and maintaining mental wellness in a fast-paced industry.


Presenters will be informed of the final session schedule by June 15th, 2026, if their submissions have been accepted. Accepted speakers will also receive an email with a discount code for lunch when they register as an attendee through Eventbrite.

Thank you .



all submitted sessions

publicly listed on this page
130 submissions
Submitted sessions
Surbhi Pokharna
  • Autonomous Azure PostgreSQL: AI agents, MCP, zero intervention
  • The self-healing database: AI agents, MCP, and the end of manual ops
Samiksha Kature
  • Delivered Is Not Done: Taking Ownership of Dashboard Adoption Beyond the Build
Andy Levy
  • Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations
Tracey Kroll
  • What's Changed: Prompting Reasoning Models
  • Intro to Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Nikita Ghai
  • From Default to Secure: Hardening SQL Server Connections with TLS and Certificates
Rahat Yasir
  • Next-Gen Data & AI Platforms: From Fabric to Foundry and Agentic Enterprise Design
  • AI That Delivers: Framework to choose the Right Use Cases and Proving ROI
Amy Abel
  • Creative GitHub Strategies for the Modern Database Professional
  • The DBA's Guide to GitHub Security, Finding Leaked Database Secrets Before Attackers Do
Shouvik Sharma
  • SQL Optimization Techniques That Save Thousands of Dollars
Rick Lowe
  • PostgreSQL High Availability for the Career SQL Server DBA
  • Query Hints ... What’s the Worst That Can Happen
Jeff Iannucci
  • Defending Your SQL Server: Privilege Escalation in Action
  • Defending Your SQL Server: Practical Strategies against Ransomware
show all submissions
Mike Donnelly
  • Fabric Deployments using fabric-cicd and Azure Devops
  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the AI: T-SQL Edition
  • An Intro to Fabric for the Rest of Us
Rob Volk
  • Log Shipping for SQL Server
  • Revenge: The SQL!
  • DeepSQL: How To Discover SQL Server Internals
Aditya Rokade
  • Modern Data Simplified: Databases, Data Engineering Principles, and Microsoft Fabric Esseentials
Shrividya Hegde
  • Airflow + AI : Orchestrating AI using Airflow 3
  • Self-Healing Airflow: Pipelines That Fix Themselves
  • Vectorless RAG: When "Similar" Isn't "Relevant"
Haripriya Naidu
  • Fix Your Worst Transaction Rollback Nightmares with ADR
Chris Seferlis
  • Why AI Fails in the Real World — and How to Build Systems That Don’t
Kalpita Raut
  • Monitoring the Machine: Architectural Circuit Breakers for Live AI Infrastructure
  • Move Fast Without Breaking Compliance: Implementing Airtight Guardrails for Day 2 AI
David Seis
  • Build a Custom Monitoring Solution for your SQL Server Environment
  • Approval Flows That Think: Adding AI Decision Support to Human-in-the-Loop Workflows
  • Intro to PowerShell Automation for the SQL Server DBA
Testing Developer
  • Building a Personal Brand for Career Growth in Tech
Steve Jones
  • How do I get started with AI?
  • Testing Database Code 101
  • Architecting Zero Downtime Database Deployments
Jeff Taylor
  • Auto Index Compaction - SQL Server
  • Fabric SQL Database: Simplifying OLTP and Real-Time Analytics
  • How To Tune A Multi-Terabyte Database For Optimum Performance
Praparna Moharana
  • Algorithmic Compliance Monitoring and Temporal Rule Automation in Medicaid EVV Programs
Ketaki N/A, Abhishek Srivastava
  • Optimising LLM Inference: Techniques for Faster, More Efficient & Scalable AI Systems
Leonard Lobel
  • What's New for Developers in SQL Server 2025
  • Empowering AI Applications with Vector Search in SQL Server and Azure Cosmos DB
  • Change Event Streaming in SQL Server 2025: Real-Time Data Has Finally Arrived
Rashmi Mandayam
  • The Unscripted Path into GRC: Real Talk on Breaking In, Building Skills, and Using AI
Kristyna Ferris
  • Stop Hoping for a Raise and Start Engineering One
  • Exploring Real-Time Horizons with Microsoft Fabric
  • The Fellowship of the Star Schema: Transforming OLTP Data for Power BI
  • Fabric Activator Stress Test - Build It, Price It, & Let's See If Low Code Can Mean Low Cost
Deborah Melkin
  • Optimized Locking: Improving SQL Server Transaction Concurrency
  • Change Tracking in SQL Server 2025: Exploring Change Event Streaming vs CDC
  • Women in Tech (WIT) Panel
George Walters
  • SQL Server 2025: an enterprise AI-ready database platform
  • Migrate SaaS application with SQL Server to the cloud!
Rajaniesh Kaushikk
  • The lakehouse talks back: grounding Microsoft Foundry agents on a live Microsoft Fabric data estate
Shannon C. Ryan
  • The Next Era is Female-Led: Technology Priorities for High-Performance Organizations
  • Where Women Lead, Innovation Follows: An Outlook on AI, Automation, and Digital Infrastructure
  • Women in the Room, Future Secured: A Leadership Perspective on 2026 Tech Adoption
Pat Wright
  • Critical DBA Tasks for Postgresql
  • Speaking and Community Involvement for the Introvert
  • Postgres for the Sql Server DBA
Kristen B. Hubler
  • The Analyst’s Soft Skills Playbook: Turning Data Into Decisions
Christian Cote
  • Accelerating Lakehouse ETL with Fabric’s Low‑Code Tooling
Merin Gazell
  • Orchestrating Multi-Agent AI Workflows with Squad
Andy Yun
  • A Practical Introduction to Vector Search in SQL Server 2025
  • Is Storage to Blame? A Practical Deep Dive into I/O
Beth Iaciofano N/A
  • From Doubt to Trust: Building Self-Trust for Confident Decision-Making
Andrew Madson
  • Data-Centric AI: Accelerate Success with Apache Iceberg Data Products
  • The Who, What, and Why of Data Lake Table Formats
  • Iceberg for Agents - Elevate Data to Context For Modern AI Systems
Sonal Kalra
  • Mindful Leadership in the Age of Data and AI
Balazs Horvath
  • Agents 006: The license to build. Picking the right Microsoft agent for your mission
Akhil Sharma
  • From Intent-Based to Reasoning-Based: Migrating Assistant Actions to Agents
Kevin Feasel
  • Microsoft Foundry for the Skeptical Developer
  • The Basics of Speech and Natural Language Processing
  • Hello, Computer: An Introduction to Azure AI Speech
Sajitha Sritharan
  • The Sponsorship Gap: Why Mentorship Isn't Enough for Women in Technical Roles
  • Your AI Agent Is Dumb (And How Semantic Kernel Fixes It)
  • Semantic Layers: The Missing Foundation for Agentic AI in Enterprise
Juan Pablo Garcia Gonzalez
  • Solving AI Context Window Overflow: Implementing the Memory Pointer Pattern for Token-Bounded Agent
Dominick Raimato
  • Extending Power BI with Power Automate
  • Fabric and Copilot Studio - A Perfect Pair
  • Hey Real-Time Intelligence - should I go outside today?
Gethyn Ellis
  • The Hidden Cost of Bad Prompts: A Practical Guide to Prompt Engineering for Data Professionals
Jeremy Doran
  • Storytelling: Your Secret Superpower
  • Lost in Translation: How to Communicate with People Who Think Nothing Like You
  • D$I : The Business Case for Cognitive Diversity
Thomas Johnson
  • From alert to action: redesigning your observability stack for agentic AI
  • Your agentic stack has a day-2 problem
Sudhir Amin
  • Autonomous Database Operations using Agentic AI for SQL Server
  • Beyond Traditional DBA Practices - Transforming T-SQL Script Expertise into AI Agents
John Miner
  • Many ways to track changes in SQL Server
  • Fabric Data Engineering with Python Notebooks
  • Introduction to the data build tool (dbt)
Selvamurugan Ramamoorthy
  • From Compliance to Intelligence: Building GxP-Ready Data Platforms with SQL Server
Nilton Kazuyuki Ueda
  • Databricks Lakeflow: Simplifying Data Integration for the AI Era
  • Unlocking Databricks AI/BI Genie: Redefining Business Intelligence with Generative Intelligence
Edward Pollack
  • Parameter Sniffing: Everything You Have Been Told is Wrong!
  • Advanced OLAP Optimization with Columnstore Indexes
  • My Favorite New T-SQL in SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL Database
Ray Kim
  • Networking 101: Building professional relationships
  • I lost my job! Now what?!? A survival guide for the unemployed
  • SQL101 -- Learning about SQL: Building a Sandbox Using the Free Developer Edition
Chetan Nandikanti, Alvaro Costa-Neto
  • Autonomous Database Operations using Agentic AI for SQL Server
Alvaro Costa-Neto
  • Mastering PostgreSQL: Advanced Techniques for SQL Server DBAs
Christopher Schmidt
  • Beyond the Star Schema: Augmenting Power BI with an Ontology and Real-Time Events in Fabric
Tomislav Hlupić
  • Degrees, Diplomas or Digital Badges – ways to formalize your education
  • Building smarter pipelines with metadata and a dash of Fabric
  • Airflow & dbt: The hipsters of data integration meet Azure
Sunil Kadimdiwan
  • AI‑Powered Analytics using Power BI MCP Server and Claude
Belinda Allen
  • Beyond the Algorithm: Women, Diversity & the Future of Tech
  • Model Smart, Perform Fast: Power BI Data Modeling for Performance & AI Readiness
  • From Wild West to Well-Run: An Introduction to Power BI Governance
Jean Joseph
  • Designing for Speed: Mastering Spark SQL Joins, Partitions, and Execution Plans
  • NotebookUtils in Action: Orchestrating Reliable ETL Pipelines in Microsoft Fabric
  • Vibe Coding in Microsoft Fabric: Transform Data Faster with Natural Language
Nirmal Jingar
  • Building Autonomous Decision Systems for Real World Operations
Madiha Shakil Mirza
  • From MCP to A2A: Building the Foundation for Enterprise Agentic Systems
Marcelo Bursztein
  • Human-Governed Agentic AI: Turning Fragmented Legacy Data into Trusted Workflows
Maria Alejandra Restrepo
  • From Chaos to the Couch: Bring Your Data to Therapy to Kickstart Governance with a Real Roadmap
Mou Rakshit
  • Designing Conversational BI: How Azure Databricks AI/BI Genie Unlocks Self-Service Insights
  • AI-Powered Real-Time Intelligence: Transforming Data-Driven Decisions with Microsoft Fabric & GenAI
  • From Data to Decisions: Building Agentic Construction Intel using Azure Databricks Agent Bricks
Jonathan Stewart
  • Governance as Code: Triage an Inherited Fabric Tenant
  • Autonomous Power BI Governance with Microsoft's Modeling MCP
  • Building Scalable Data Warehouses with Microsoft Fabric:
Paresh Motiwala
  • The 48 Laws of Power: Essential Lessons for Techhies
  • PostGres: The Elephant in the Room You Can't Ignore
  • Getting and Nailing AI Interviews