Igor Costa

Founder and CEO of Autohand AI, focused on AI agents and developer tools. He previously held senior roles at Microsoft, GitHub, and AWS, and worked on GitHub Copilot deployment and features.

The Model Alone Is No Longer the AI Product

At AI Engineer Melbourne 2026’s Day 1 keynote program, speakers including Shawn Wang, George Cameron, Sarah Sachs, Igor Costa, Vamsi Ramakrishnan and Geoffrey Huntley argued that AI engineering has moved beyond picking the strongest model. Their shared case was that useful AI products now depend on the systems around models: harnesses, routing, evals, memory, state, latency budgets, deterministic tools and cost controls. The model still matters, but the keynote program framed product advantage as an architecture and economics problem, not a leaderboard problem.

AI EngineerJun 3, 202620 min read