API calls suck! Okay, not all of them. But building your AI features reliant on third party APIs can bring a lot of trouble. In this talk you'll learn how to use web technologies to become more independent.

How to use LLMs to categorize hundreds of thousands of products into 1,000 categories at scale? Learn about our journey from manual/rule-based methods, via fine-tuned semantic models, to a robust multi-step process which uses embeddings and LLMs via the OpenAI APIs. This talk offers data scientists and AI practitioners learnings and best practices for putting such a complex LLM-based system into production. This includes prompt development, balancing cost vs. accuracy via model selection, testing mult-case vs. single-case prompts, and saving costs by using the OpenAI Batch API and a smart early-stopping approach. We also describe our automation and monitoring in a PySpark environment.

Using LiteLLM in a Real-World RAG System: What Worked and What Didn’t

LiteLLM provides a unified interface to work with multiple LLM providers—but how well does it hold up in practice? In this talk, I’ll share how we used LiteLLM in a production system to simplify model access and handle token budgets. I’ll outline the benefits, the hidden trade-offs, and the situations where the abstraction helped—or got in the way. This is a practical, developer-focused session on integrating LiteLLM into real workflows, including lessons learned and limitations. If you’re considering LiteLLM, this talk offers a grounded look at using it beyond simple prototypes.

In the fast-paced realm of travel experiences, GetYourGuide encountered the challenge of maintaining consistent, high-quality content across its global marketplace. Manual content creation by suppliers often resulted in inconsistencies and errors, negatively impacting conversion rates. To address this, we leveraged large language models (LLMs) to automate content generation, ensuring uniformity and accuracy. This talk will explore our innovative approach, including the development of fine-tuned models for generating key text sections and the use of Function Calling GPT API for structured data. A pivotal aspect of our solution was the creation of an LLM evaluator to detect and correct hallucinations, thereby improving factual accuracy. Through A/B testing, we demonstrated that AI-driven content led to fewer defects and increased bookings. Attendees will gain insights into training data refinement, prompt engineering, and deploying AI at scale, offering valuable lessons for automating content creation across industries.

At GetYourGuide, we transformed experimentation from a centralized, closed system into a democratized, self-service platform accessible to all analysts, engineers, and product teams. In this talk, we'll share our journey to empower individuals across the company to define metrics, create dimensions, and easily extend statistical methods. We'll discuss how we built a Python-based Analyzer toolkit enabling standardized, reusable calculations, and how our experimentation platform provides ad-hoc analytical capabilities through a flexible API. Attendees will gain practical insights into creating scalable, maintainable, and user-friendly experimentation infrastructure, along with access to our open-source sequential testing implementation.

Digital mapping has long been dominated by commercial providers, creating barriers of cost, complexity, and privacy concerns. This talk introduces Protomaps, an open-source project that reimagines how web maps are delivered and consumed. Using the innovative PMTiles format – a single-file approach to vector tiles – Protomaps eliminates complex server infrastructure while reducing bandwidth usage and improving performance. We'll explore how this technology democratizes cartography by making self-hosted maps accessible without API keys, usage quotas, or recurring costs. The presentation will demonstrate implementations with Leaflet and MapLibre, showcase customization options, and highlight cases where Protomaps enables privacy-conscious, offline-capable mapping solutions. Discover how this technology puts mapping control back in the hands of developers while maintaining the rich experiences modern applications demand.