July 15, 2026
Event
I went for the AI tools and came back thinking about engineering
A day at Google I/O Connect India 2026 in Bangalore, and the session that put a name to what our own projects had already taught us.
Google I/O Connect India 2026 in Bangalore was one of those events that leaves you with more questions than answers, in the best way possible.
I walked in expecting to learn about the latest AI tools. I walked away thinking about where software engineering is headed.
The day began with a keynote from the Hon'ble Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka, Shri D.K. Shivakumar, on the state's ambition to become a global AI hub. His vision for AI, and the ecosystem being built around it, was genuinely impressive.
Production AI is an engineering problem
The session by Prashanth Subrahmanyam and Richard Seroter made one point I keep coming back to. Production AI is an engineering problem, not just an AI problem.
A good prompt gets you a demo. What makes an AI system reliable at scale is everything around the model: MCP, memory, security, observability and evaluations.
Where I had already seen it
Looking back at our own hackathon projects, the parts that mattered most were not the prompts.
For the AI scam honeypot, we wrote 239 tests across 18 scam types and 10 Indian languages. We also ran it on 12 normal messages, like a parent asking for ₹500, to make sure it never treated a real person as a scammer. It flagged none of them.
Scammers probe for bots, so we tried 6 prompt-injection attacks and 5 role-reversal tricks on it. It stayed in character every time.
For Sarvik, the model reads petitions and drafts. It never makes up a number. Every figure on the screen comes from government data, and every decision stays with the MP.
Those were evaluations and security, even though we didn't call them that at the time. The session filled in the rest of the list.
Open models are moving fast
The sessions on Gemma and Google Cloud showed how accessible fine-tuning and deploying your own models has become. One live demo deployed Gemma 4 on Cloud Run. It sparked a few ideas I want to try.
After the session
One highlight of the day was meeting Prashanth Subrahmanyam after his session. He was very cool and grounded. We had a quick chat about the leap AI and engineering have made in such a short span, and grabbed a picture together.
And no Google event is complete without good food and some swag. I came back with Google Cloud caps, badges, stickers and a Nano Banana sling bag.