From left, Charles Lamanna of Microsoft, Theresa Piasta of Outreach, Swami Sivasubramanian of AWS, and Kiana Ehsani of Vercept will be among the speakers at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation summit on March 24 in Seattle.
GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation summit is a little more than a month away, and we’re announcing the first wave of speakers for the half-day event the afternoon of Tuesday, March 24, at Block 41 in Seattle, including leaders from Amazon, Microsoft, and more.
The event, presented by Accenture, focuses on questions that are top of mind for many right now: What does the rise of AI agents mean for productivity, the future of work, and the way companies and industries operate? We’re bringing together people who can speak to both the big picture and the practical realities of putting AI to work inside organizations.
Here are a few of the leaders who will be joining us, with more to be announced soon.
Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President for Agentic AI at AWS, where he leads the teams behind Bedrock, SageMaker, AgentCore, and other core AI services. He previously served on the National AI Advisory Committee, advising the White House on AI policy.
Kiana Ehsani, co-founder and CEO of Vercept, an AI startup that automates computer tasks by watching and interacting with your screen. She was previously a senior research scientist at Ai2, with a PhD from the University of Washington focused on embodied AI and robotics.
Charles Lamanna, President of Business Applications & Agents at Microsoft, where he leads efforts to embed AI agents into enterprise workflows across Microsoft’s customer base. A former startup founder, he previously led Microsoft’s Power Platform low-code technology.
Theresa Piasta, Vice President of AI Value Strategy at Outreach, where she focuses on measuring AI’s business impact and helping organizations design effective human-and-AI teams. Her background spans enterprise tech, Wall Street, and military leadership.
The afternoon will also feature a startup zone where early-stage companies will showcase their work and pitch for a live audience, along with panel discussions, fireside chats, and interviews. The main program runs from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., followed by a networking reception.
This event builds on an ongoing GeekWire editorial series, underwritten by Accenture, spotlighting how startups, developers and tech giants are using intelligent agents to innovate.
Thanks to presenting sponsor Accenture and gold sponsors Nebius and AWS Marketplace for helping to make the event possible. For sponsorship opportunities, to participate in the startup zone, or any other inquiries about the event, contact events@geekwire.com.
Details
When: Tuesday, March 24, 2026, 1:30–5:30 p.m.
Where: Block 41, 115 Bell St., Seattle
Tickets: Early bird pricing is $145 through Feb. 24.
Register here or below, and see you March 24 in Seattle!
Until recently MySQL was the leading open source database across the world. However, PostgreSQL has become the default choice for many new projects and younger developers, thanks to its active community, rich feature set (especially extensions), and strong brand momentum. Earlier this month Oracle put out a blog post on how it plans to expand the community edition of MySQL. In response the MySQL community has now published an open letter inviting Oracle to join it in a conversation about establishing a non-profit foundation to support and ensure the future of the MySQL ecosystem. It argues that this would create… [Continue Reading]
Modern software is built on open source projects. In fact, you can trace almost any production system today, including AI, mobile, cloud, and embedded workloads, back to open source components. These components are the invisible infrastructure of software: the download that always works, the library you never question, the build step you haven’t thought about in years, if ever.
A few examples:
curl moves data for billions of systems, from package managers to CI pipelines.
Python, pandas, and SciPy sit underneath everything from LLM research to ETL workflows and model evaluation.
Node.js, LLVM, and Jenkins shape how software is compiled, tested, and shipped across industries.
When these projects are secure, teams can adopt automation, AI‑enhanced tooling, and faster release cycles without adding risk or slow down development. When they aren’t, the blast radius crosses project boundaries, propagating through registries, clouds, transitive dependencies, and production systems, including AI systems, that react far faster than traditional workflows.
Securing this layer is not only about preventing incidents; it’s about giving developers confidence that the systems they depend on—whether for model training, CI/CD, or core runtime behavior—are operating on hardened, trustworthy foundations. Open source is shared industrial infrastructure that deserves real investment and measurable outcomes.
That is the mission of the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund: to secure open source projects that underpin the digital supply chain, catalyze innovation, and are critical to the modern AI stack.
We do this by directly linking funding to verified security outcomes and by giving maintainers resources, hands‑on security training, and a security community where they can raise their highest‑risk concerns and get expert feedback.
Why securing critical open source projects matters
A single production service can depend on hundreds or even thousands of transitive dependencies. As Log4Shell demonstrated, when one widely used project is compromised, the impact is rarely confined to a single application or company.
Investing in the security of widely used open source projects does three things at once:
It reinforces that security is a baseline requirement for modern software, not optional labor.
It gives maintainers time, resources, and support to perform proactive security work.
It reduces systemic risk across the global software supply chain.
This security work benefits everyone who writes, ships, or operates code, even if they never interact directly with the projects involved. That gap is exactly what the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund was built to close. In Session 1 & 2, 71 projects made significant security improvements. In Session 3, 67 open source projects delivered concrete security improvements to reduce systemic risk across the software supply chain.
Session 3 focused on improving security across the systems developers rely on every day. The projects below are grouped by the role they play in the software ecosystem.
These projects define how software is written and executed. Improvements here flow downstream to entire ecosystems.
This group includes CPython, Node.js, LLVM, Rustls, and related tooling that shapes compilation, execution, and cryptography at scale.
For example, improvements to CPython directly benefit millions of developers who rely on Python for application development, automation, and AI workloads. LLVM maintainers identified security improvements that complement existing investments and reduce risk across toolchains used throughout the industry.
When language runtimes improve their security posture, everything built on top of them inherits that resilience.
Web, networking, and core infrastructure libraries 📚
These projects form the connective tissue of the internet. They handle HTTP, TLS, APIs, and network communication that nearly every application depends on.
This group includes curl, urllib3, Netty, Apache APISIX, quic-go, and related libraries that sit on the hot path of modern software.
Compromising build tooling compromises the entire supply chain. These projects influence how software is built, tested, packaged, and shipped.
Session 3 included projects such as Jenkins, Apache Airflow, GoReleaser, PyPI Warehouse, webpack, and related automation and release infrastructure.
Maintainers in this category focused on securing workflows that often run with elevated privileges and broad access. Improvements here help prevent tampering before software ever reaches users.
Data science, scientific computing, and AI foundations 📊
These projects sit at the core of modern data analysis, research, and AI development. They are increasingly embedded in production systems as well as research pipelines.
Projects such as pandas, SciPy, PyMC, ArviZ, and OpenSearch participated in Session 3. Maintainers expanded security coverage across large and complex codebases, often moving from limited scanning to continuous checks on every commit and release.
Many of these projects also engaged deeply with AI-related security topics, reflecting their growing role in AI workflows.
These projects shape the day-to-day experience of writing, testing, and maintaining software.
The group includes tools such as Selenium, Sphinx, ImageMagick, calibre, Spyder, and other widely used utilities that appear throughout development and testing environments.
Improving security here reduces the risk that developer tooling becomes an unexpected attack vector, especially in automated or shared environments.
These projects form the backbone of authentication, authorization, secrets management, and secure configuration.
Session 3 participants included projects such as Keycloak, external-secrets, oauth2 libraries, WebAuthn tooling, and related security frameworks.
Maintainers in this group often reported shifting from reactive fixes to systematic threat modeling and long-term security planning, improving trust for every system that depends on them.
Security as shared infrastructure
One of the most durable outcomes of the program was a shift in mindset.
Maintainers moved security from a stretch goal to a core requirement. They shifted from reactive patching to proactive design, and from isolated work to shared practice. Many are now publishing playbooks, sharing incident response exercises, and passing lessons on to their contributor communities.
That is how security scales: one-to-many.
What’s next: Help us make open source more secure
Securing open source is basic maintenance for the internet. By giving 67 heavily used projects real funding, three focused weeks, and direct help, we watched maintainers ship fixes that now protect millions of builds a day. This training, taught by the GitHub Security Lab and top cybersecurity experts, allows us to go beyond one-on-one education and enable one-to-many impact.
For example, many maintainers are working to make their playbooks public. The incident-response plans they rehearsed are forkable. The signed releases they now ship flow downstream to every package manager and CI pipeline that depends on them.
Join us in this mission to secure the software supply chain at scale.
Projects and maintainers:Apply now to the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund and help make open source safer for everyone. Session 4 begins April 2026. If you write code, rely on open source, or want the systems you depend on to remain trustworthy, we encourage you to apply.
Funding and Ecosystem Partners: Become a Funding or Ecosystem Partner and support a more secure open source future. Join us on this mission to secure the software supply chain at scale!
Thank you to all of our partners
We couldn’t do this without our incredible network of partners. Together, we are helping secure the open source ecosystem for everyone!
Funding Partners: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, American Express, Chainguard, Datadog, Herodevs, Kraken, Mayfield, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe, Superbloom, Vercel, Zerodha, 1Password
Ecosystem Partners: Atlantic Council, Ecosyste.ms, CURIOSS, Digital Data Design Institute Lab for Innovation Science, Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, Microsoft for Startups, Mozilla, OpenForum Europe, Open Source Collective, OpenUK, Open Technology Fund, OpenSSF, Open Source Initiative, OpenJS Foundation, University of California, OWASP, Santa Cruz OSPO, Sovereign Tech Agency, SustainOSS
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