A fireside chat on earning trust for technology that moves through the middle of our communities.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 9:30am
Amanda Ventura is joining WCUS 2026 for a fireside chat, sitting down with David Levine to talk about what it takes to build public trust in AI that shows up in the physical world.
The AI she’s building trust into.
Amanda works on the public affairs team at Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company on a mission to be the world’s most trusted driver. Her team sits at the intersection of AI and community, working directly with road safety and accessibility advocates to build a future of safer, more inclusive journey powered by autonomous driving.
That’s a genuinely different kind of “user research” than most of us are used to. It’s not A/B testing a checkout flow. It’s earning trust from the people whose streets, safety, and daily lives are directly affected by what you build and doing it in public, with real stakes, before that trust is given.
Who’s asking the questions.
Hosting this conversation is David Levine, an award-winning nonprofit founder and a member of the WordPress Core AI Team who bring AI functionality to nearly half the web. He’s spent more than a decade working with not-for-profits, NGOs, and local government. Today, as Director of Growth Engineering at rtCamp, he uses WordPress to solve complex problems for enterprise clients, but the throughline hasn’t changed: build things people can actually rely on.
Why this belongs on a WordPress stage.
Both Amanda and David have spent their careers earning trust in public, at very different scales which makes for exactly the kind of fireside chat worth clearing your calendar for.
Most of us building on WordPress are used to thinking about trust in fairly familiar terms: uptime, security, accessibility, whether the thing we shipped actually works the way we promised. This fireside chat takes that same question and moves it from the digital world to the physical one, specifically on the road.
Open source has always been a conversation about trust: trusting contributors, trusting maintainers, trusting a platform to keep running the way it’s supposed to for the 40%+ of the web that depends on it. Autonomous driving is that same conversation, just with far higher stakes and a much more skeptical public to convince. However this fireside chat unfolds, expect it to surface something worth sitting with regardless of what you build: how do you earn trust from people who didn’t ask for the technology in the first place, and how do you keep it once you have it?
See you on the main stage!
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 9:30am
Check out the full schedule and speakers page for the latest, and grab your ticket if you haven’t yet.
See you in Phoenix. 🌵
