Austin GILD AI Forum x Tecla: AI and Engineering Leaders Dinner — October

A working dinner for senior technical leaders

The GILD AI Forum, run in partnership with Tecla Labs, gathers a deliberately small group — 20 to 25 people — of CTOs, VPs of Engineering and Heads of AI. It runs under Chatham House Rules, and there are no panels, no pitches and no product demos. This is the October sitting of a series that meets roughly every six to seven weeks.

Format

The evening opens with a Conversation Starter: a practitioner describing what their team is genuinely building with AI right now, problems included. The room then breaks into small rounds where each attendee introduces their company along with a live project, a win, or a failure, and the group works it over.

Agenda: 6:00 p.m. arrival and food, 6:30 welcome, 6:45 conversation starter, 7:00 breakout rounds, 8:00 open discussion.

Themes flagged for this session

• Escaping the proof-of-concept trap and getting agents into real production workflows
• Integrating modern AI with legacy stacks that predate it by decades
• Runaway AI tooling spend and how to control it
• Engineers moving from writing code to orchestrating agents and reusable components
• MCP and multi-agent orchestration in practice
• Governance and review for AI-generated code

Practical details

Attendance is free but approval-gated, and seats are capped. The organisers publish downtown Austin as the location but do not release the exact venue publicly — the address goes to approved guests only, so watch for it in your confirmation. Given the seniority filter, apply early rather than close to the date.