Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 17 hours ago
Slides from this talk: github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/blob/master/Papers_Articles_Presentations/Slide_Presentations/From%20Pipelines%20to%20Swarms%20Rethinking%20Automation%20in%20AI.pptx.pdf
Traditional automation pipelines are built on a comforting assumption: the world is predictable enough to be scripted. But modern commerce rarely behaves that way. Product onboarding, pricing, compliance validation, localization, and publication operate across distributed domains, shifting policies, regional rules, incomplete data, and constant exceptions. Each new edge case becomes another conditional branch, each governance requirement another gate, until automation slows, teams revert to manual work, and time-to-market stretches from days into weeks.
This talk proposes a different mental model: agentic swarms, networks of specialized AI agents that coordinate through real-time signals rather than rigid, pre-baked sequences. Instead of enforcing a single “correct” workflow, swarms negotiate outcomes across domains, adapting plans as events arrive and constraints evolve. They continuously interpret event streams, detect anomalies early, recommend actions, and trigger targeted remediation, while knowing when (and why) to escalate to humans for judgment, risk, or ethics.
It will be shown how event-driven orchestration, contract-first interfaces, and capability discovery enable cross-service coordination in a federated system. We’ll also cover the operational backbone that keeps swarms trustworthy: immutable decision trails that record not just what happened, but why; saga-style compensation for safe distributed change; and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for high-stakes approvals.
Speaker Biography
Amit Kumar Padhy is a Senior Computer Scientist II and Lead Architect at Adobe. Based in Sunnyvale in the San Francisco Bay Area, he works out of Adobe’s San Jose, California headquarters. He specializes in cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and AI-enabled digital commerce. He architects and modernizes mission-critical, event-driven microservices at a global scale, with an emphasis on reliability, performance, cost optimization, and platform governance. Amit is an invited keynote speaker at international IEEE conferences and has delivered PRO-level talks at leading industry events, including DeveloperWeek, ProductWorld, and major AI and Data Summits. He has also served on advisory boards for IEEE and ACM conferences.
Slides from this talk: github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/blob/master/Papers_Articles_Presentations/Slide_Presentations/From%20Pipelines%20to%20Swarms%20Rethinking%20Automation%20in%20AI.pptx.pdf
Traditional automation pipelines are built on a comforting assumption: the world is predictable enough to be scripted. But modern commerce rarely behaves that way. Product onboarding, pricing, compliance validation, localization, and publication operate across distributed domains, shifting policies, regional rules, incomplete data, and constant exceptions. Each new edge case becomes another conditional branch, each governance requirement another gate, until automation slows, teams revert to manual work, and time-to-market stretches from days into weeks.
This talk proposes a different mental model: agentic swarms, networks of specialized AI agents that coordinate through real-time signals rather than rigid, pre-baked sequences. Instead of enforcing a single “correct” workflow, swarms negotiate outcomes across domains, adapting plans as events arrive and constraints evolve. They continuously interpret event streams, detect anomalies early, recommend actions, and trigger targeted remediation, while knowing when (and why) to escalate to humans for judgment, risk, or ethics.
It will be shown how event-driven orchestration, contract-first interfaces, and capability discovery enable cross-service coordination in a federated system. We’ll also cover the operational backbone that keeps swarms trustworthy: immutable decision trails that record not just what happened, but why; saga-style compensation for safe distributed change; and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for high-stakes approvals.
Speaker Biography
Amit Kumar Padhy is a Senior Computer Scientist II and Lead Architect at Adobe. Based in Sunnyvale in the San Francisco Bay Area, he works out of Adobe’s San Jose, California headquarters. He specializes in cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and AI-enabled digital commerce. He architects and modernizes mission-critical, event-driven microservices at a global scale, with an emphasis on reliability, performance, cost optimization, and platform governance. Amit is an invited keynote speaker at international IEEE conferences and has delivered PRO-level talks at leading industry events, including DeveloperWeek, ProductWorld, and major AI and Data Summits. He has also served on advisory boards for IEEE and ACM conferences.
