Speak at The Fifth Elephant 2026 Annual Conference

In an enterprise the hard part is not making the model clever. Modern models already read code and write decent patches. The trouble starts when we hand an agent real work that runs over many steps and many sessions. It drifts, forgets, and often reports that it is done when it is not. Better prompts do not fix this. What fixes it is the environment we build around the model, and that environment is what we call a harness.
This session willl talk about how to build effective harness around AI agents. We will define a harness as the closed loop the model works inside, and split it into five simple concerns, instructions, state, verification, session and scope, and life cycle, where each concern answers a real failure. We will then give a walk though of a worked example, a harness that takes a task from plan to pull request on your own machine and make the agent work reliably on the given task.

{Mention 1-2 takeaways from your session}
A concrete five-part mental model for harness engineering, instructions, state, verification, session and scope, and life cycle, that turns a vague buzzword into a checklist you can apply to your own agents.
A buildable blueprint for a local agent harness, the plan, build, verify, fix loop that you can replicate easily on your machine reliably.

{Which audiences is your session going to beneficial for?}
This session is for engineers and engineering leaders.

{Add your bio - who you are; where you work}
Udit Ujagar is a Vice President and Senior Principal Engineer at Arcesium with over 18 years of experience building scalable distributed systems, and is now focused on AI-native solutions for the enterprise. He has a strong eye for developer experience and enjoys exploring open-source tooling and building systems at scale. Beyond work, he plays cricket and loves chatting about emerging technology.
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/uditujagar/]

{Add the link to draft slides - PDF/PPT - with comments access}
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AS05--IQrEKv20oMH94gB23Tb82gHjhi/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=104645287248053107878&rtpof=true&sd=true

{Add the link to 2-min elevator pitch video}