· ai-devtools
QCon AI New York 2026 Program Committee Picks: Agent Identity, Context Costs, and Open-Source Infere
How should teams manage growing context costs?
What changes when coding agents become part of everyday engineering work? The QCon AI New York 2026 program committee has selected six sessions they are looking forward to at the December 15–16 conference.
Their picks examine these questions alongside open-source inference, agent standards, and audio AI. Conference chair Hien Luu, an AI/ML leader, advisor, speaker, and author, joins committee members Wes Reisz, Technical Principal at Thoughtworks and creator of The InfoQ Podcast, and Faye Zhang, Staff Engineer at Google building autonomous agents for Gemini Enterprise, in sharing their selections.
Wes Reisz selected When Software Becomes a User: Identity and Authorization for Agents in Production, a keynote by Nancy Wang, CTO at 1Password. As agents take on more autonomous work, traditional identity and authorization models start to break down.
Nancy will explore delegated authority, credential management, and securing agent interactions, foundational capabilities I believe we must get right to truly adopt agentic delivery. Nancy's keynote examines how authority is delegated across subagent chains and how agents can access the credentials they need without exposing secrets in their context.
