Moving beyond the hype towards real AI outcomes.
Thank you for your interest in our executive dinner event focused on harness engineering. We have reached capacity and look forward to hosting you on a future event.
If you'd like to stay in touch on trends in this space, or have interest in attending a future event, please contact us here.
Event Details
8th Light welcomes you to an elevated private dining experience at Beatrix located in Chicago's Loop at 155 N. Wacker on September 15, 2026. Our custom dinner menu will feature comfort food with a healthful twist, plus drinks for your enjoyment.
- Recommended arrival — 5:15p
- Opening remarks — 5:45p
- Dinner, drinks and discussion — 6:15p
- Event conclusion — 8:15p
This is a small-group, focused conversation on what we've all learned so far on the journey with agentic AI. This specific edition of our Agentic AI dinner series is focused on how high performing teams are taking advantage of harness engineering, a term that was first coined in February 2026.
Most organizations aren’t short on AI ideas, that's for sure. But many organizations fall short on AI that holds up in production, under load, inside the workflows that matter. That's where harness engineering plays a big role, which we will discuss at this private dinner with your fellow executive peers.
Meet Your Thought Leaders
Travis Frisinger serves as Head of Agentic AI at 8th Light, where he leads engineering and strategy for building production-grade AI systems. He focuses on designing adaptive architectures that help organizations integrate AI into real-world workflows, improving decision-making, reliability, and operational clarity.
Travis brings a deep background in distributed systems and large-scale software delivery, with experience across logistics, telecommunications, and data-intensive platforms. His work spans LLMOps, context-aware retrieval, and agentic workflow design, with a strong emphasis on moving teams beyond experimentation toward secure, maintainable systems in production.
At 8th Light, Travis partners closely with engineers, product leaders, and executives to align technical direction with business priorities. He is known for developing frameworks and platforms that reduce complexity, improve developer effectiveness, and bring coherence to fast-evolving systems.
Travis also contributes to 8th Light’s thought leadership around AI adoption, writing and speaking on topics such as context engineering, the AI Decision Loop, and human–AI collaboration. His work focuses on making AI systems understandable, observable, and usable in real production environments.
Drake Fish is a Lead Engineer at 8th Light and the first 8th Lighter to earn Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect credential, a benchmark for engineers building production-grade AI systems. He has led major cloud migration and infrastructure modernization work, improving scalability, security, and disaster recovery while reducing operational overhead.
At a global pharmaceutical company, Drake ships platform integrations and runs AI enablement sessions for engineering teams and their leadership. He also builds in the open, including an autonomous robot he designed with agentic AI tools and no prior robotics experience, wiring mistakes documented for everyone to learn from. Drake is a recent recipient of 8th Light's peer-nominated Beacon Award.
JJ Lueck is a Principal Crafter at 8th Light and a Claude Certified Architect. He has spent the last year using agentic coding tools on real client work, from a heavily regulated global enterprise to two-person startups. He strives for delivering quality software in the new frontier of agentic coding.
Before consulting he spent 25 years building backend systems for Internet applications, including at Google, as a founding member of the Data Liberation Front and technical lead behind Google Takeout, and at Tock, where he and team built the ticketing and payments platform that grew to $2.4 billion in payments processed over 7 years. He enjoys interviewing engineering candidates and is helping to test and redesign 8th Light's interview process to find the best candidates that understand the power and speed of agentic coding.