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NODES 26 — November 12, 2026

Fireside Chat with Andrew Ng and Emil Eifrém

Session track: General Sessions

Session times: (Asia Pacific) (Europe) (Americas)

Session description:

Building complex agentic systems requires more than connecting AI models—it takes new approaches to engineering, context, and data. In this fireside chat, Dr. Andrew Ng, a global leader in AI innovation and education, joins Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, to explore what’s next for AI engineering. They’ll discuss the skills, techniques, and approaches AI engineers need to build smarter, more capable AI applications.

Speakers

photo of Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng

Managing General Partner at AI Fund

Andrew Ng is the Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Managing General Partner at AI Fund, Managing Partner at AI Aspire, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. As a pioneer in machine learning and online education, Dr. Ng has changed countless lives through his work in AI. Over 10 million people have taken an AI class from him. He was the founding lead of the Google Brain team, which helped Google transform into a modern AI company. He served as VP & Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company’s AI technology and strategy. He was formerly Director of the Stanford AI Lab, home to 20+ faculty members and research groups. In 2023, he was named to the Time100 AI list of the most influential AI persons in the world. He has authored/co-authored over 200 papers in AI and related fields and holds a B.Sc. from CMU, M.Sc. from MIT, and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Dr. Ng now focuses his time primarily on providing AI training and on his entrepreneurial ventures, looking for the best ways to accelerate responsible AI adoption globally. Follow Dr.Ng on Twitter (@AndrewYNg) and Linkedin.

photo of Emil Eifrem

Emil Eifrem

Co-Founder & CEO, Neo4j

Emil Eifrem sketched what today is known as the property graph model on a flight to Mumbai way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and has devoted his professional life to building, innovating, and evangelizing graph databases and graph analytics. He is also co-author of the O'Reilly book Graph Databases. Neo4j today helps more than 75 of the Fortune 100, and a community of over hundreds of thousands of practitioners find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Emil plans to change the world with graphs and own Larry's yacht by the end of the decade.