Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga joins StrictlyVC SF lineup—expect real talk on AI at scale

StrictlyVC San Francisco just got a bit more interesting. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga is now confirmed for the April 30 event at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, joining a lineup that was already shaping up well.

The event, which kicks off TechCrunch’s 2026 events calendar, has been stacking speakers who actually have something to say about AI and scale. Naga’s session is billed as a discussion on “operating at scale in the age of AI”—which, if you’ve been paying attention to Uber’s recent moves, is exactly where the company has been pushing hard.

I’ve been watching Uber’s AI infrastructure evolve over the past couple of years. They’ve been quietly building out a lot of internal tooling for real-time decision making, from pricing algorithms to route optimization to fraud detection. Having the CTO come talk about this stuff in public is a smart move—it signals that Uber is serious about treating AI as a core operational capability, not just a buzzword.

What I’m hoping to hear is some honest talk about the trade-offs. Everyone loves to hype AI’s potential, but operating at Uber’s scale means dealing with latency constraints, data privacy regulations across dozens of markets, and the sheer engineering complexity of rolling out models that touch millions of users every day. If Naga gets into the gritty details—like how they handle model drift or how they balance centralized AI with local decision-making—that’ll be worth the price of admission.

The rest of the lineup is solid too, but Naga’s addition gives the event a practical, operations-focused angle that’s often missing from AI conferences. Too many events are either too academic or too salesy. This one might actually hit the sweet spot.

If you’re in the Bay Area and working on AI infrastructure, this is probably worth your time. April 30, Sentro Filipino Cultural Center. I’ll be curious to see how much detail Naga goes into—and whether the audience asks the hard questions about real-world deployment challenges.