Opening Keynote: From Coder to Producer: Building in the AI Era

For decades, software engineers worked like solo instrumentalists, writing every line of code by hand. AI changed that. Today’s engineers have the equivalent of an Akai MPC sampler: the machine generates raw material instantly, and the real craft lies in what happens next. This keynote reframes the modern engineer as a producer—someone who curates AI output, shapes systems, and brings the human taste and judgment a machine can’t replicate.
New Relic’s Jemiah Sius leads a panel with Agentic AI Foundation’s Angie Jones, Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman, Atlanta’s Donnie Beamer, and RenderATL founder Justin Samuels on what this means in practice: how engineering teams ship faster without losing architectural discipline, production visibility, or the human element.
After the panel, Jemiah and Grammy-winning artist Killer Mike explore the parallels between the sampling revolution in hip-hop and the AI shift reshaping software.

Jemiah Sius, VP Developer Relations, New Relic

Killer Mike, Grammy-winning Artist and Entrepreneur

Angie Jones, VP of Developer Experience, Agentic AI Foundation

Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community, Microsoft

Donnie Beamer, Senior Technology Advisor, City of Atlanta

Justin Samuels, Founder, RenderATL

Shipping AI Without the Fear: Beating Agent Debt in the Superhuman Era

AI has lowered the barrier. to building but it has created a massive new bottleneck for shipping: Agent Debt. As LLMs generate more of our code the gap between how code looks in the IDE and how it behaves in production is causing incidents to spike. Traditional dashboards can't keep up in a world where operations are going headless. In this ession New Relic tackles the defining operational challenge of modern engineering. We'll dive deep into New Relic Autopilot (a fully automated SRE agent that triages incidents and pinpoints root causes before you even open your laptop) and New Relic Ground Truth (token-efficient API-first tools that feed high-fidelity system telemetry directly into your own custom AI agents). Learn how to ground your autonomous workflows in reality.

Inside AI Observability: Live Demo of Autopilot and Ground Truth

See New Relic's AI observability tools in action. This live demo dives into New Relic Autopilot and New Relic Ground Truth, showcasing how real-time execution visibility and preflight validation can help you tackle AI's biggest operational challenges.

Closing Keynote: Belonging as Infrastructure: The Human-Centric Future of Engineering

In this closing keynote for RenderATL 2026, Tracy Williams, Chief People Officer at New Relic, makes a bold case: belonging, psychological safety, and culture aren't soft topics sitting beside the "real" work of tech. They are the real work, especially in the AI era.

Tracy explores a sharp tension. AI is shipping code faster than ever, yet most senior engineers now spend their days debugging code they didn't write. The result isn't only a technical challenge; it's a human sustainability crisis, with experienced people burning out on rework.

Her thesis is clear. Visibility and observability solve more than technical problems. When engineers can see how their systems truly behave, confidence returns, imposter syndrome fades, and diverse teams thrive. She pushes further on equity: access to an AI prompt is not equity. Real equity means clarity, evidence, and the ability to see clearly.

Tracy closes with a challenge to every builder in the room: reach back, pull the next wave forward, and build a genuinely human-centric future.

OpenTelemetry for AI Apps

How do you know if your AI app is actually working? Vibes set the stage, but real data helps you keep your app healthy and users coming back to your site. This session introduces OpenTelemetry’s GenAI semantic conventions: a vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting LLM calls, tracking token usage, capturing model latency, and tracing the full lifecycle of an AI request from user input to response. You’ll leave with a clear picture of what good observability looks like for AI-powered apps and the patterns to start applying it in your stack today.

The Vibe Coder’s Field Guide to AI

What’s actually happening when your AI feature does something weird? Everyone in this room is either building with AI or about to. But most of us are working from vibes; we know roughly what it does, but not how, which means when it breaks or behaves unexpectedly we have no framework for reasoning about it. This session gives you that framework in 25 minutes.

Shipping at the Speed of AI (Without Flying Blind)

With AI we're shipping more code faster than ever. But velocity has outpaced understanding, and when things go sideways, you don't always have the context to figure out what actually happened. What if you could get that context way earlier? This session is about pulling observability into the development phase of the SDLC (or AIDLC, if you're nasty) so you understand your code as you build it. More context, less guessing, way more robust code.

Agents, The Superhuman Layer for Your Telemetry

Microservices or AI distributed systems, they all break, they have the same challenges with ensuring performance and reliability. However, the role of AI in observability has fundamentally evolved. We have transitioned from basic telemetry scraping and passive querying to autonomous AI agents capable of predicting downtimes, executing root-cause analysis (RCA), recommending code refactors, and driving automated remediation.. In this session we will understand how the evolution has impacted observability space along with extended MCP and integrations that can help you with faster MTTR.

AWS OpenTelemetry Game Day

A game day powered by OpenTelemetry, New Relic, and AWS, featuring the Astronomy Shop (OpenTelemetry’s demo application). Solve real-world production problems, win cool prizes.

AI Monitoring Workshop

In this workshop, we will focus on leveraging New Relic's AI Monitoring to confidently build and run AI applications. You'll learn how to achieve comprehensive observability across your stack to maintain peak performance, ensure compliance, promote quality, and observe costs. Through hands-on demonstrations and practical exercises, you'll gain insights into best practices for monitoring and managing AI-driven systems, ensuring they are reliable, efficient, and compliant with industry standards. Join us to master the tools and techniques that will empower you to optimize your AI applications and drive business success.

Harry Kimpel, Principal Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic

Mehreen Tahir, Senior Software Engineer, New Relic

Reese Lee, Lead Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic

Alerts Quality Management Workshop

Step into the shoes of a newly hired Site Reliability Engineer tasked with a critical mission: using guided missiles to protect spaceships from asteroids. In this hands-on workshop, you will master New Relic Alerts to survive the chaos. We will dive into Alert Quality Management, explore strategies to prevent alert fatigue and "alert storms," and leverage metrics, events, logs, and traces for superior signal acquisition. You'll also get a foundational introduction to Observability as Code, equipping you with the vital skills needed to keep humanity's space travels safe.

[Repeat] AI Monitoring Workshop

In this workshop, we will focus on leveraging New Relic's AI Monitoring to confidently build and run AI applications. You'll learn how to achieve comprehensive observability across your stack to maintain peak performance, ensure compliance, promote quality, and observe costs. Through hands-on demonstrations and practical exercises, you'll gain insights into best practices for monitoring and managing AI-driven systems, ensuring they are reliable, efficient, and compliant with industry standards. Join us to master the tools and techniques that will empower you to optimize your AI applications and drive business success.

Harry Kimpel, Principal Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic

Mehreen Tahir, Senior Software Engineer, New Relic

Zameer Fouzan, Lead Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic