ACM CAIS: Conference on AI and Agentic Systems

Last week, I traveled to San Jose to attend the ACM CAIS conference. On Day 0, I gave a short talk at the Supporting our AI Overlords (SAO) workshop. And yes, I promise to write a summary of our paper, "A Case for Simulation-Driven Resilience in Agent-First Data Systems" soon! To start with an overall impression of the conference: much of the work presented felt exploratory and anecdotal. Since the compound AI space is still so new, many work seemed to share on-the-ground best practices that worked for them rather than principled results. Some talks really leaned into the "agent, act like a senior engineer and don't make mistakes" vibe. This was especially apparent in the "Agent Skills Workshop". I am not saying this is a bad thing, I learned some valuable lessons from that workshop, which I'll share below.CAIS defines the conference's scope broadly as "research on compound AI architectures, optimization, and deployment". Unfortunately, this broadness seemed to work against the main…