Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Join AWS for an immersive event designed to help California public sector leaders and technologists across state and local government and education tackle their most pressing mission challenges with purpose-built intelligent tools and solutions. You'll see how agentic and generative AI capabilities are already helping agencies streamline operations, accelerate service delivery, and simplify legacy application complexity—with the security, compliance, and speed your organization requires.
Whether you're setting strategy or writing code, you'll leave with practical frameworks, live demos, and hands-on workshops that turn priorities into progress.
The day kicks off with a keynote and fireside chat exploring how purpose-built AWS infrastructure delivers lower costs, advanced tools, and real results for agencies like yours. From there, choose your path:
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Executive track: Strategy-focused sessions that begin with a practical AI execution playbook — identifying quick wins, understanding cost structures, and building a 90-day roadmap — then go deeper into how agentic AI transforms legacy modernization from a hundred-million-dollar gamble into an evidence-based, manageable program, and close with the financial modeling frameworks needed to build compelling migration business cases. No technical background required.
Technical track: See how AWS generative AI services support every stakeholder persona, then see demos with Amazon Quick and AWS DevOps Agent through live agency scenarios. In the afternoon, select from four hands-on workshops designed to apply the tools directly to real-world scenarios. Please bring your laptop — it is required for the hands-on sessions.
This event is for state and local government and education customers including:
- Executives, IT directors, and decision makersÂ
- Business analysts and program managersÂ
- Developers and technical staff who want hands-on experience with AWS services
Executive track:
AI strategy execution: From quick wins to scalable programs
This session provides a practical playbook for public sector leaders ready to move beyond AI strategy into measurable execution. Attendees will walk away with a clear framework for identifying high-value, low-risk AI use cases, a plain-language understanding of how AI costs are structured and forecasted, and a concrete 90-day roadmap they can begin implementing immediately.
Technical track:
From citizen to code: How AWS generative AI meets every stakeholder where they are
Every state agency has diverse stakeholders, from citizens interacting with services, to business analysts seeking insights, to developers building the next generation of applications. In this session, we explore AWS's purpose-built AI services, such as AWS Security Agent, AWS DevOps Agent, Amazon Quick, Amazon Bedrock, and Kiro, showing how each deliver tailored Generative AI-powered capabilities designed to accelerate productivity for every persona. We'll also cover the capabilities that make it possible to deliver these innovations with the security and compliance required by California agencies and departments.
Executive track:
Understand before you change: How agentic AI accelerates application modernizationÂ
Your legacy systems aren't failures, they're inherited complexity. But the distance between what those systems can deliver today and what your mission demands tomorrow is growing every quarter. In this talk, we'll show how Agentic AI now enables organizations to analyze, map, and comprehend decades-old systems in days, turning what used to be multi-year, hundred-million-dollar gambles into manageable, evidence-based transformations. You'll also learn why 95% of the problem is now solvable at speed, and why the critical 5% still requires your leadership to get across the finish line.Â
Technical track:
Demo with AWS AI tools: Amazon Quick and AWS DevOps Agent
Building on the personas framework from our previous session, this hands-on demonstration shows how Amazon Quick and AWS DevOps Agent deliver immediate value to different roles within your agency. Watch as we walk through real scenarios: a business analyst using Amazon Quick to transform natural language questions into dashboards, automated workflows, and AI agents that handle routine tasks; and an IT operator or developer using DevOps Agent to autonomously investigate incidents, provide root cause analysis, and deliver targeted recommendations. We'll demonstrate how these tools integrate with your existing AWS environment and address common procurement and compliance questions for California agencies and departments.
Executive track (1:30PM - 2:30PM):
Migration EconomicsÂ
Master the financial modeling for cloud migration with proven frameworks from the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). Learn how to calculate TCO reduction, demonstrate ROI with 20% average infrastructure cost savings (47% for top performers), and leverage MAP funding to offset migration costs. Understand how to build compelling business cases that resonate with executive stakeholders and accelerate decision-making for migration initiatives.
Technical workshops (1:30PM - 3:30PM) - choose one:
A Complete Guide to Amazon Quick: The Agentic AI Business WorkspaceÂ
Amazon Quick is an agentic AI workspace that helps enterprise teams automate tasks, analyze data, and conduct research. You interact through conversational AI that accesses your data, the web, documents, knowledge bases, and connected applications. It combines business intelligence, workflow automation, AI-powered research, and app building into a single product where everything works together.Â
AWS DevOps Agent WorkshopÂ
In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to use AWS DevOps Agent to troubleshoot and resolve operational issues in serverless applications, containerized applications, and applications consuming AI/ML services.  This provides an overview of how DevOps Agent can be used to troubleshoot any workload running in AWS.Â
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AI-Driven Development with KiroÂ
Learn how to use Kiro's AI-native development capabilities to build features faster while maintaining code quality and architectural consistency through hands-on exercises.  We’ll explore several Kiro capabilities, showing patterns for integration with your own software development and operational processes.Â
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Modernize and upgrade your applications with AWS TransformÂ
Conduct a hands-on assessment of applications for upgrading, containerization, or re-platforming to managed AWS services. You'll run code analysis, estimate migration effort, and build a modernization roadmap, preparing you to orchestrate code transformation at scale.
