From Pivot to Purpose: David vonThenen on AI, ML & Career Reinvention

David vonThenen is a Senior AI/ML Engineer in the Office of the CTO at NetApp, a seasoned keynote speaker, and an open source contributor with deep expertise in Agentic AI, deep learning, RAG architectures, and cloud-native systems.

His career has taken him from hardware firmware and storage drivers to Kubernetes, to conversational AI, to building ML models that help classify diseases — that's a real pivot story. If you want a grounded, no-hype take on where AI is actually going and how to build a career that keeps evolving, David is the guy.