{"summary":"Mike Onslow speaks at conferences, executive offsites, meetups, and on podcasts. Talks are storytelling-driven and anchored in production systems.","topics":[{"title":"vCons: the PDF for conversations","body":"Why conversations need a portable, standard container, what the vCon standard actually specifies, and what becomes possible once your calls, chats, and meetings are data instead of exhaust."},{"title":"AI that does real work, with the team you already have","body":"The playbook for shipping AI with the team you already have: teaching and coaching the people in the building, including non-engineers, to build the tools that take the busywork off their plate. What we built, what broke, and why leveling people up beat hiring a research department."},{"title":"From vibe coding to agentic engineering","body":"AI-assisted development is real, and it is not magic. This is agentic engineering done right: using AI coding agents while actually understanding the systems you are building, and turning the energy of vibe coding into software a business can run on."},{"title":"Automating the mundane","body":"Automation isn't just n8n anymore. With agentic tools like Claude, Manus, and OpenAI's Operator, it is easier than ever to hand off the repetitive parts of the job. Practical builds, not toy demos, drawn from automations running in production."},{"title":"AI adoption inside a real company","body":"Training non-engineers, building an ambassadors program, governing without strangling, and what actually changes day to day when a whole company starts working with AI."}],"signature_talks":[{"title":"The Last 10 Percent: Shipping Real Software with AI Agents","blurb":"The five-minute AI demo is easy. Taking that code from 90% to 100% and into production is where it fights you, and the gap is your process, not the model. I walk the exact loop my team uses to ship production software with AI agents, a loop that works whether you drive Copilot, the Microsoft Agent Framework, Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex. You see the failure that lurks at each step and the guardrail that catches it, then a live demo: an agent turning a meeting transcript into a shipped change, senior engineers encoded as skills a junior can summon, and the MCP servers feeding it live context.","meta":"60-minute talk + live demo · the evolution of From Vibe to Value, given at Data in the D","newest":true},{"title":"Your Best People, On Demand: Turning Your Secret Sauce into Skills","blurb":"Every business has a secret sauce: the way your best people handle the hard calls and the steps they never skip. Most of it lives in their heads and walks out the door when they do. A skill captures how your business actually does a thing, written down and reusable, so it gets done the same way every time, by anyone on the team or any AI they point at it. Skills travel across platforms and outlast the model of the month. That is how you put your best people on demand and keep the know-how in the building. Drawn from skills running in production, not slideware.","meta":"Solo talk"},{"title":"You Probably Don't Need an Agent: Automating the Mundane in 2026","blurb":"Everyone is selling agents. Most of the boring work you actually want to hand off does not need one. This talk draws the line between an integration, a workflow, an agentic flow, and an agent, and shows how to spot which one a job really needs, so you stop paying for autonomy you will not use. The builds come from automations running in production, not toy demos.","meta":"Solo talk"},{"title":"vCon: The PDF for Conversations","blurb":"Every company sits on a mountain of its most valuable data, and most of it evaporates the moment a conversation ends. We solved the document problem decades ago with PDF. vCon does the same for conversations: an open, IETF-track standard that packages any conversation, voice, video, chat, SMS, or email, into one structured container of who spoke, what was said, and every layer of analysis you derive from it. Once a conversation is a vCon, it stops being a black box and becomes a row you can search, join, and analyze. A live demo turns dark conversational data into topic trends, sentiment, and CSAT signals you could not query before.","meta":"45-minute talk + live demo · the open standard, vendor-neutral"}],"selected_talks":[{"event":"Spring '26 vCon Conference","location":"Dallas, TX","date":"March 2026","items":[{"title":"Fraud Has a Pattern. vCons Have the Signal","format":"Solo talk on surfacing fraud signals from conversation data with vCons"}]},{"event":"Fall '25 vCon Conference","location":"Washington, DC","date":"December 2025","items":[{"title":"The Conversational Code Review: Fostering Empathy in a Virtual World","format":"Solo talk"},{"title":"Lessons Learned: Building & Deploying vCon Apps & Services","format":"Panel with Eugene Tcipnjatov (Phound) and Thomas McCarthy-Howe (Vconic), moderated by Andy Abramson"}]},{"event":"Data in the D","location":"Detroit, MI","date":"October 2025","items":[{"title":"From Vibe to Value","format":"Conference talk introducing vCons to Detroit's data community"}]},{"event":"VibeCoding Meetup","location":"Detroit, MI","date":"July 2025","items":[{"title":"Building Voice-Enabled Apps with AI","format":"Live demo, later covered by The Barefoot Dev"}]},{"event":"Detroit Tech Watch","location":"Southfield, MI","date":"June 2025","items":[{"title":"Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Action","format":"Solo talk with a live demo of a conversational intelligence MCP server, going past data access into authentication and authorization"}]},{"event":"Spring '25 vCon Conference","location":"Cape Cod, MA","date":"April 2025","items":[{"title":"Enhancing Business Intelligence with Voice: Practical Applications of vCons in Franchises and Call Centers","format":"Solo case study"}]},{"event":"Michigan Technology Conference (MITechCon)","location":"Pontiac, MI","date":"March 2025","items":[{"title":"Automating the Mundane with n8n + Generative AI","format":"Solo talk on wiring n8n and generative AI into real workflow automation"},{"title":"The Impact of AI on Software Development","format":"Birds of a Feather conversation co-hosted with Onorio Catenacci, co-organizer of Detroit TechWatch"}]},{"event":"MIDOTNET","location":"Michigan .NET community","date":"January 2025","items":[{"title":"Build Custom GPTs and Assistants with OpenAI","format":"Hands-on developer talk on building custom GPTs and assistants"}]}],"podcasts":[{"show":"Telecom Reseller News","date":"April 2025","title":"How Clarity Voice Is Using vCon Technology to Save Customers and Simplify the Tech Stack","href":"https://telecomreseller.com/2025/04/29/how-clarity-voice-is-using-vcon-technology-to-save-customers-and-simplify-the-tech-stack-podcast/"},{"show":"The Barefoot Dev","date":"2025","title":"Mike Onslow on Building Voice-Enabled Apps with AI and Getting Back to Your Code","href":"https://www.thebarefoot.dev/blog/mike-onslow-on-building-voice-enabled-apps-with-ai-and-getting-back-to-your-code"}],"booking":{"how":"POST https://mikeonslow.com/api/contact with topic \"speaking\", or use the form at https://mikeonslow.com/contact?topic=speaking","include":"Event name, date, location, audience, and format (keynote, panel, workshop, podcast)."},"_policy":{"rate_limit":"60 requests per minute per IP","usage":"Public professional information about Mike Onslow. You may quote and summarize it freely with attribution to mikeonslow.com.","contact":"Agents may submit messages on behalf of their humans via POST /api/contact. Identify the human you represent in the message body."},"_source":"https://mikeonslow.com"}