Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
#VDZ26 Teams building with AI are often presented with a false choice: share data to get frontier models, or protect privacy and accept weaker results. It is a convenient story, especially for anyone who benefits from accessing your data, but it is not the full story.
This session introduces a counterintuitive paradigm where AI models can improve without ever collecting your raw data, and where organizations can collaborate without giving up control. By combining Federated Learning, the idea of training locally while learning globally, with cryptographic computation on encrypted updates using Homomorphic Encryption, the result is a system that treats privacy not as a policy or a feature, but as a structural property by design.
Through practical examples, this session explores why centralized training creates hidden constraints like security exposure, compliance friction, and data gravity that limit real-world adoption. You will learn how Federated Learning flips the classic “bring data to the code” approach, and how Fully Homomorphic Encryption closes the final subtle leak: what model updates can reveal, even when your valuable data never leaves your yard.
#VDZ26 Teams building with AI are often presented with a false choice: share data to get frontier models, or protect privacy and accept weaker results. It is a convenient story, especially for anyone who benefits from accessing your data, but it is not the full story.
This session introduces a counterintuitive paradigm where AI models can improve without ever collecting your raw data, and where organizations can collaborate without giving up control. By combining Federated Learning, the idea of training locally while learning globally, with cryptographic computation on encrypted updates using Homomorphic Encryption, the result is a system that treats privacy not as a policy or a feature, but as a structural property by design.
Through practical examples, this session explores why centralized training creates hidden constraints like security exposure, compliance friction, and data gravity that limit real-world adoption. You will learn how Federated Learning flips the classic “bring data to the code” approach, and how Fully Homomorphic Encryption closes the final subtle leak: what model updates can reveal, even when your valuable data never leaves your yard.
![[VDBUH2026] Victor Rentea - Kenote: AI Didn’t Replace You. It Promoted You!](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5hVlf9_G71Q/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] Victor Rentea - Kenote: AI Didn’t Replace You. It Promoted You!
We’ve always been rewarded for writing code, debugging systems, and mastering frameworks. But today, AI no longer just assists – it builds, analyzes, debugs, and reasons, so our role gets upgraded to shaping systems, taking decisions, and achieving outcomes. But as our attention moves away from code, how can we remain in control and keep the quality high? That’s the tension many senior engineers feel. This talk explores how AI agents can offload our chores, preserve our mental energy, and amplify our impact across the system—distilling lessons from early adopters of agentic engineering.
But this is not a talk about tools. It’s a talk about identity.
Because the real question today isn’t: “Will AI change my job?”
It’s: “Will I evolve fast enough to stay relevant?”")
