Xharmagne Carandang Founding Engineer, Lorikeet

Xharmagne Carandang is a software engineer with a passion for product and design, driven by the goal of “building the right things right”. With over 15 years of experience, she has built and maintained a wide range of software across industries, from interactive 3D web experiences to complex, production-scale systems.

As a founding engineer at Lorikeet, she works across product, design, and engineering to shape and deliver AI systems in real-world environments. Lorikeet takes a pragmatic approach to AI (treating agents as the “how,” not the “why”) and focuses on tackling complex, high-stakes use cases from the outset, with an emphasis on systems that scale beyond early demos.

Her main interest lies in where humans and computers interact, especially as that relationship is reshaped by emerging technologies like GenAI.

AI is changing everything. This includes the problems we can solve, the products we build, and the way teams work. “Human in the Loop” is an approach to shaping that change, making sure human judgment guides AI at the moments that matter. The real work of AI transformation is thoughtful design of that loop: deciding where humans add the most value, where AI can take the lead, and how that collaboration happens. That is deeply human work.

In this session Xharmagne will share stories from the trenches of a startup where AI powers both the products and how they work every day. You’ll hear about successes, growing pains, and the lessons learned about designing human-AI collaboration that actually works. From team processes to product design, these examples emphasise the importance of deciding how to place humans intentionally, making the most of both human judgment and AI capabilities to achieve more than we once thought was possible.