# How DigitalOcean's Team Ran Deploy 2026 and Demonstrated AI Products

DevFeed: [How DigitalOcean's Team Ran Deploy 2026 and Demonstrated AI Products](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-team-behind-deploy-shipping-ai-the-digitalocean-way-19861.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/behind-deploy-2026>)

Author: Sujatha R

Published: 2026-06-03T19:38:43Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [DigitalOcean](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/digitalocean.md>)

Topics: [Digital Ocean](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/digital-ocean.md>), [AI Infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-infrastructure.md>), [AI Routing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-routing.md>)

Tags: [2026](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/2026.md>), [ai-infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-infrastructure.md>), [ai-routing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-routing.md>), [culture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/culture.md>), [digitalocean](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/digitalocean.md>), [event](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/event.md>), [gpu](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gpu.md>), [mongodb](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mongodb.md>), [nvidia](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/nvidia.md>)

## AI overview

The article profiles three DigitalOcean employees involved in organizing Deploy 2026 and demonstrating the company's AI-Native Cloud, including Inference Router. It also recaps product launches, customer participation, sponsors, and event operations.

## Source excerpt

Deploy 2026 came and went, and we're still buzzing. For one day at Convene 100 Stockton in San Francisco, developers, startup founders, customers, and partners filled the room to talk about a shared challenge: how to build and scale AI products without unnecessary complexity. Conversations moved from infrastructure to inference costs, production workloads, vector databases, and what teams actually need to get AI applications from prototype to production. We're grateful to everyone who showed up and made it what it was. DigitalOcean took the covers off the AI-Native Cloud, a five-layer stack purpose-built for AI-native companies, with more than 15 product launches in a single keynote. That included Inference Router, Dedicated Inference, Managed Weaviate, Knowledge Bases, expanded GPU and model capabilities, and a new Kansas City data center with liquid-cooled B300s. The event had seven sponsors, including NVIDIA, AMD, Weaviate, OpenRouter, MongoDB, and others. Customers like Hippocratic AI, Character AI, and Higgsfield shared how they are building on DigitalOcean. Deploy 2026 was a cross-company effort, and a reflection of how DigitalOcean works every day. View YouTube video These three team members capture what our culture of true ownership looked like up close: Meghan Grady, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications. She and her team led the planning and execution behind Deploy, including keynote production, customer programming, live streaming, social coverage, and event communications. Mitchell Mocchi, Sales Account Executive, and the team worked alongside sales, solutions architecture, support, and engineering teams. He met directly with customers on the Deploy floor and helped them through the AI infrastructure decisions in real-time. Tyler Gillam, Senior Software Engineer II, and his team helped build the Inference Router, DigitalOcean's AI routing product. He worked with engineering and product teams to demo it live during the keynote. A career high for