Workshops
We're excited to bring you workshops led by industry experts this year to help you enhance your product and development skills.
Workshop Details:
- Workshops are affordably priced and ticketed separately from the main conference
- There is a bundle with a discount to attend both workshops
- You can attend the workshops independently - no conference ticket required
- Both sessions take place in downtown Asheville the Thursday before the conference
Anne is a product leader and AI strategist with 14+ years of experience building products in 0 to 1 startups and in Fortune 500 giants in multiple industries, including AI. She’s worked across B2C, B2B2C, and B2B SaaS. Anne has lectured at universities across North America such as Columbia University, West Point, the University of Montreal, and Morgan State University. She’s also spoken at major events such as SXSW, and created courses such as Jumpstart Your AI Career for Pearson and O’Reilly Media. Her insights on AI and tech have been highlighted in Rolling Stone and The Atlantic, and she’s appeared in the YouTube Original series, RetroTech, with Marquees Brownlee.
Anne has built her career in tech working with organizations such as Priceline, Microsoft, Comcast, Mercedes-Benz, as well as up and coming startups in emerging tech. She continues to learn about and seek out practical human aspects of technology and building products with emerging and disruptive technologies.
Building Successful Products with AI Workshop
Anne T. Griffin
Downtown Asheville
Thursday July 17th, 2025 1:00pm - 2:45pm
In an era where everyone's rushing to let AI drive their product decisions
Learn how to use AI as an amplifier of your super powers, while keeping your product intuition sharp and your customer connection stronger than ever.
After This Workshop, You Will Be Able To:
- Increase new product and feature success rates through AI-enhanced validation, including using AI prototyping, instead of launching products and features with lots of risk and assumptions baked in
- Know how, when, and why to use AI tools for rapid prototyping, data analysis, shaping user guides for customer conversations, market and customer research, and structured, impactful feedback
- Accelerate successful product development timelines, instead of feeling slowed down by dependencies, bandwidth, and the most tedious delivery tasks
- Build a proactive, resourceful mindset for AI-human collaboration
- Have more time to focus on the highest leverage things for the product's success, instead of getting bogged down by repetitive tasks
Brent Laster is a global trainer, author, and speaker on open-source technologies, as well as an experienced developer, manager, and director. He is also the founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations, LLC – a company dedicated to making technology understandable and usable. Throughout his career in software development and management, Brent has always made time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. He believes that regardless of the topic or technology, there’s no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.
Advanced features in GitHub Copilot Hands-on Workshop
Brent Laster
Downtown Asheville
Thursday July 17th, 2025 3:00pm - 4:45pm
GitHub Copilot is arguably the most popular AI-driven coding assistant. It is available for many development environments and also integrated into GitHub itself. In addition to code completion suggestions and chat capabilities, it also offers advanced features such as:
- Copilot Edits
- Copilot Agent
- Copilot Extensions
- Copilot Workspace
What to Expect
In this workshop, author, trainer, speaker, and experienced DevOps leader Brent Laster, author of the new Learning GitHub Copilot book from O'Reilly will explain what each of these features does and then guide you through hands-on labs to use them in practice.
Note: This is not an introductory Copilot workshop, so a basic working knowledge of GitHub Copilot is assumed.
Requirements
You'll need a laptop and a userid on the public GitHub.com to get the hands-on experience!