We teach what we ship.
Trusted by product and engineering teams at Boeing, Asana, and Realtime Networks.
What we do
021:Events works with practitioners and teams building real AI systems inside production environments. Our programs are used by product and engineering teams at enterprise organizations, leaders responsible for AI adoption, and teams moving from experimentation to deployment.
Select programs are delivered in partnership with Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, where participants earn a recognized micro-credential upon completion.
Why 021:Events exists
Most AI training fails in one of two ways. It is either high-level strategy that never translates into execution, or technical tutorials disconnected from real product work. Neither helps teams ship.
021:Events exists to close that gap. The focus is on how AI systems are actually built, how they integrate into real products, and how teams operationalize them inside engineering and product workflows. Every workshop is grounded in systems we are actively designing and deploying.
Led by practitioners
021:Events is built and led by operators working directly in product, engineering, and AI systems.
David Gratton
Sr. Partner, 021:Events
David is a Sr. Partner at 021:Events. He is the co-founder of the Agentics Foundation and an Agentic AI instructor at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He serves as VP of Product and Operations at Theory+Practice, an ML and AI company building production AI systems for retail and CPG organizations including Nestle, Loblaws, L'Oreal, and London Drugs.
A frequent speaker on practical AI adoption, David's talk to studio heads at the Game Developers Conference (2025) generated immediate demand for hands-on agentic AI training. That response directly led to the founding of 021:Events.
He spent 17 years as CEO of Work at Play, an enterprise product and engineering studio, working with organizations including Microsoft, Apple, EA, and Budweiser.
Ryan Smith
Sr. Partner, 021:Events
Ryan Smith is the Senior Partner of 021:Events and CEO of Smith Horn Group, a vertically integrated product studio delivering end-to-end product discovery and agentic AI development for technology companies.
Ryan has delivered agentic AI workshops for product and engineering teams at Boeing and Asana, and led fractional product engagements at Cloudinary, taking their Shopify ecosystem strategy from discovery through validated product. As Product Lead at Shopify, he built and shipped improvements to image, video, and 3D media technologies that generated a $10 billion impact across the platform. His work in AI-driven retail technology includes production deployments with luxury platforms including LVMH and Farfetch.
He is the creator of Skillsmith, an agent-native skill builder designed to help teams create, secure, and optimize agent skills for production agentic systems.
Ryan is an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he teaches product discovery, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market strategy. He does not just advise on what to build. He builds alongside teams and stays engaged until the work ships.
Part of 021Shift
021:Events is part of 021Shift. 021Shift works with organizations to drive enterprise transformation through AI, helping leadership teams move from experimentation to operational capability.
The relationship is intentional. 021:Events builds practitioner capability through workshops. 021Shift scales that capability across teams and organizations. Many enterprise engagements begin when individuals attend a workshop and bring the approach back to their teams.
How organizations engage
Organizations typically start in one of two ways. Individual practitioners attend public workshops to build hands-on capability, then expand into broader team training or transformation initiatives. Or organizations engage directly to run private workshops, develop internal AI capability, and accelerate adoption across product and engineering.
Talk to us about a private workshop.
A 021Shift Inc. company