Bill Ayers - Past Speaking Engagements

Bill Ayers

Flow Simulation Ltd

Technical Director

United Kingdom

Speaker award

Speaker award

Speaker award

Past Speaking Engagements

Dr Bill Ayers is a consultant developer and solution architect who has been working with computers for over 30 years. He originally earned his PhD in applications of computers in engineering before specialising in collaboration with SharePoint and more recently Microsoft 365 and Azure. He also specialises in mobile development and agile software development practices, and has been doing AI since the 1990s. He is a Microsoft Certified Master and Charter MCSM for SharePoint, and a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Microsoft MVP for M365 and AI Platform. He has also taken over forty Microsoft certifications and is a CompTIA CTT+ certified classroom trainer. He speaks regularly at international conferences and user groups and is based in Sheffield, UK.

Artificial Intelligence and the Peak of Inflated Expectations

Thrive Conference 2026

ai

machine-learning

ethics

llm

08/06/2026

Kompas Xnet

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Mistral: European AI between USA and China

Thrive Conference 2026

ai

artificial-intelligence

08/06/2026

Kompas Xnet

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Supercharge your Development Flow with GitHub Copilot

Thrive Conference 2026

ai

development

github-copilot

08/06/2026

Kompas Xnet

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Fact Checked: How to Deal with Hallucination in LLMs

European AI and Cloud Summit 2026

ai

llm

rag

multi-agent

05/05/2026

Confex - Koelncongress

Cologne, Germany

Designing for Impact: Responsible AI in Innovation and Industry

ECS 2026

ai

05/05/2026

Confex - Koelncongress

Cologne, Germany

Bill can deliver sessions in

English

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Connect with Bill

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Adriatics Tech Summit

Adriatics Tech Summit

30/03/2026, Congress Center Hotel Hills
Ilidža, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Developing Advanced AI Solutions that Actually Do Stuff

ai

development

llm

agents

azure-ai-foundry

agent-framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the way we build intelligent applications, but using them effectively requires more than just good prompts. Out of the box, LLMs are frozen in time, lack access to your private data and, most worryingly, can produce plausible but incorrect responses. To create trustworthy AI agents - applications that can reason and act - we need to combine models with additional tools, data sources, and orchestration layers. This one-day course will guide you through using Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft's one-stop portal for AI infrastructure. We'll use AI frameworks to build practical AI applications, including agentic systems that can plan, reason, and act on objectives. We’ll see how to extend raw LLM capabilities with techniques such as prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), plugins (tools), and orchestration. This hands-on, full-day course will use various AI models provisioned in Azure AI Foundry. We'll focus on Microsoft Agent Framework, an AI orchestration SDK available in C# and Python that simplifies the integration of LLMs into enterprise-grade solutions. You'll learn how to: • Apply prompt engineering and RAG for accuracy and grounding. • Extend LLMs with custom plugins, APIs, and business logic. • Build multi-agent workflows. • Use responsible AI practices. • Design and deploy agentic systems that go beyond text generation to perform actions. Bring your laptop to follow along with the examples, or simply observe and learn. Either way, you’ll be equipped to design, build, and deploy AI applications that go beyond chat and deliver real business value.

CollabDays Bletchley Park 2023 September Edition

CollabDays Bletchley Park 2023 September Edition

27/09/2023, National Museum Of Computing
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense

ai

machine-learning

openai

copilot

azure-cognitive-services

large-language-models

deep-learning

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are popular topics at the moment, but how much of it is hype, and can AI deliver tangible business benefits? We can use the pre-trained models in Azure Cognitive Services to identify well-known objects and landmarks, but that's a narrow field that's the result of huge research projects and ingesting massive amounts of data. How can we apply that to practical business problems, like visually detecting faults, spotting our company logo, or answering emails? To understand the answer to this question you need to understand the principle of Transfer Learning. We'll look at the theory, and then see it working, and see some of the tools in Azure Cognitive Services and other toolkits that allow us to use this technique without needing to be an expert in AI. Then we'll look at Transformers, a newer technology that has made a huge impact recently with autogenerative language models that are used by Chat-GPT and Copilot. And we'll talk about where this technology is taking us, and realistically look at the ethical and existential risks in this rapidly moving field.