2027 Speakers
Steve Taplin, CEO, Sonatafy Technology, Inc
Steve Taplin is the CEO of Sonatafy Technology, a Software Delivery Acceleration Systems company that helps organizations turn stalled and high-stakes software initiatives into systems they can trust in production. His work sits at the intersection of engineering leadership and delivery accountability, with a growing focus on how organizations validate AI before it reaches environments where a wrong output carries real consequences. Steve has spent more than 25 years building and leading technology companies. He has founded over 30 companies across that span, an experience that includes 20 failures and 10 multi-million-dollar successes, and he draws on both sides of that record when he talks about what actually separates technology that works from technology that only demos well. He is a prolific voice in the industry, with more than 248 published articles in Forbes, Entrepreneur, CIO, and Inc., where he writes on software delivery, engineering leadership, and the practical realities of deploying AI. He hosts Software Leaders Uncensored, a podcast with more than 200 episodes featuring candid conversations with engineering and product leaders, and he has delivered more than 50 speaking engagements to technical and executive audiences. At Sonatafy, Steve leads a firm built on a single idea: that accountability for outcomes, not access to engineers, is what determines whether software delivers on its promise. That principle is directly relevant to public safety and critical communications, where AI is increasingly deployed into dispatch, video analytics, and NG911 systems without a reliable way to measure whether it is working. Steve brings an operator's perspective to that problem, focused less on which technology to buy and more on how to know whether what you deployed does what it promised under real conditions.