Women in Cloud - Lightning talks

We’re excited to announce a milestone for our community — Women in Cloud is going online for the very first time! 🎉
Join us for an inspiring session of Lightning Talks, where women in tech share ideas, experiences, and insights in a fast-paced, supportive environment.

Agenda
6:00pm – Check-in, intro
6:15pm – Talks
7:15pm – Quiz & Prizes
7:30pm - Networking

Speakers & Sessions

• Stella Slad — Beyond OCR: Taming Semi-Structured Documents with GenAI
• Jahnavi Gurrappadia — Building Responsible AI on AWS: 5 Security Guardrails Every Team Should Know
• Dale Orders — Structuring IaC for Sanity and Scale
• Tehani Navoda Wanniarachchi — Beyond Chatbots: What Evert Cloud Engineer Should Know About AI Agents
• Gina Bocanegra — Unlock Your Data Warehouse: Turning BigQuery Tables into Actionable Telemetry

Sessions Details:
Session 1. Beyond OCR: Taming Semi-Structured Documents with GenAI

Summary:
In this talk, we explore how Generative AI elevates document processing beyond traditional, template-based OCR. Using Appian DocCenter as a case study, I will demonstrate how to extract data from varying document layouts using simple natural language prompts instead of complex coding. Traditional data extraction relies on rigid templates that break whenever a document's layout changes. GenAI solves this bottleneck by interpreting the actual context and meaning of the data. This shift allows teams to handle messy, unpredictable files more effectively, using human-in-the-loop workflows to ensure accuracy at scale.

Speaker:
Stella Slad is an Appian Consultant and Developer dedicated to building efficient, low-code business solutions. She is deeply passionate about exploring how Generative AI is transforming document intelligence and business process automation.

Session 2. Building Responsible AI on AWS: 5 Security Guardrails Every Team Should Know

Summary:
As Generative AI adoption accelerates, security and governance must be part of the design from day one. This session highlights five essential AWS security guardrails for building responsible AI applications. Learn how to protect sensitive data, manage secure access, implement Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, monitor AI workloads, and strengthen governance. Attendees will gain practical insights and best practices to build AI solutions that are secure, compliant, and trustworthy on AWS.

Speaker:
Jahnavi is a software testing and AI governance professional with expertise in software and security testing, test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration within Agile environments. With a strong foundation in cybersecurity testing and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), she is passionate about building responsible and secure AI solutions. She regularly speaks on practical AI implementation, helping organisations adopt AI safely and effectively.

Session 3. Structuring IaC for Sanity and Scale

Summary:
Infrastructure as Code tends to go wrong in two ways: it either becomes too rigid to change or too flexible and hard to reason about. This talk looks at how to structure IaC so it sits in the middle, easy to use but still adaptable as systems grow. We’ll cover common mistakes like unclear module boundaries, inconsistent environments and messy state, and how they slowly turn into real operational pain.

Speaker:
Dale Orders is a software engineer at Five9. She works in the platform team, managing resources and deployments. She is also an AWS Community Builder.

Session 4. Beyond Chatbots: What Evert Cloud Engineer Should Know About AI Agents

Summary:
AI agents are changing the way we build cloud applications. I'll introduce what AI agents are, how they differ from traditional chatbots, and how Azure AI services enable them. I'll also share the key skills cloud engineers can start learning today to prepare for the future of AI-powered applications.

Speaker:
Tehani Wanniarachchi is a Software Engineer with 3 years experience, Master of Applied Artificial Intelligence and passionate about learning, innovation and sharing knowledge, and inspiring others

Session 5. Unlock Your Data Warehouse: Turning BigQuery Tables into Actionable Telemetry

Summary:
Tired of costly and complex cross-cloud pipelines? This talk reveals how to efficiently sync BigQuery data to New Relic using a serverless Google Cloud Function. Discover a simpler, cheaper, and more secure architecture for your observability data.

Speaker:
Gina Bocanegra is a Data Engineer at REA Group specialised in cloud architecture and data pipelines. She currently focuses on strengthening large-scale data products by defining and documenting service level indicators and objectives for key metrics, improving observability across BigQuery - and pipeline-based workflows.

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We’re incredibly grateful to our sponsors Mantel and REA group — for supporting our community and making this event possible.

Join us for an evening of learning, meaningful conversations, and great company, we can’t wait to see you there!