Marlene Mhangami
Marlene is a Senior Developer Advocate specialising in Python and AI at Microsoft, a computer scientist, keynote speaker and explorer. She is the current chair of the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM) practitioner board, was the previous vice chair of the Python Software Foundation and led the first PyCon Africa.
Session
Python now powers nearly half of all new AI repositories (State of the Octoverse Report 2025.) It is the most used language for Applied AI work, from training and inference to orchestration and deployment. Regardless of its popularity in the space, AI has caused a significant divide within the Python community. Many Pythonistas believe it should not be used at all, while others are excited about its potential to increase their output. As developers, we also find ourselves reluctantly at the frontier, being told our jobs are at risk, while simultaneously being pushed to use AI to make us more productive. In this talk we'll explore all of these themes and try to understand the 'right way' to do AI.