PyCon DE & PyData 2026

Eric Glaser

I am a data scientist at Steadforce, building LLM and agent workflows with Python from cloud to edge. My current focus is AI literacy: helping teams understand what LLMs, RAG, and agents actually do beyond the hype. I co-designed “AI Factory,” a game where players break and fix AI systems to build real intuition.


Session

04-16
13:20
30min
Escape the Hype: Teaching LLM Concepts Through an Interactive AI Factory Game
Vadim Vlasov, Eric Glaser, Lisa Amrhein

Everyone talks about LLMs, RAG, and AI agents - but who truly understands them? Marketing promises magic while documentation assumes expertise. Recent research from Gartner reveals the consequences: only 8% of HR leaders believe their managers possess adequate AI competency, while companies that restructure work around AI achieve revenue goals twice as often as those who merely train employees. The problem isn't lack of information; it's the lack of genuine understanding through experience.

We took a different approach. Instead of slides or tutorials, we built "AI Factory" - a non-profit educational platform in the form of escape room game where players learn by doing. Craft prompts under budget pressure. Watch guardrails fail in real-time. Break their own RAG pipeline. Each mistake teaches more than any documentation ever could.

In this talk, we'll share what we discovered while building and testing this game with real users: why failure-driven learning outperforms tutorials, how game mechanics create memorable "aha moments," and the surprising concepts that clicked only through play.

General: Education, Career & Life
Helium [3rd Floor]