CrabRAG: Why Automated Assistants Need Graph Memory, Not More Tokens
Stephen Chin
- When
- Thursday, July 210:45 AM – 11:05 AM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 5San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
Autonomous assistants are easy to demo and hard to make reliable. The problem is usually not tool access. It is memory. Most assistant architectures still treat memory as a chat log plus vector retrieval. That is fine for document question answering, but it breaks down when the assistant must connect conversations, people, tools, and decisions across multiple tool iterations. For an AI engineer, a single request can depend on a Slack thread, a GitHub PR, a failed CI run, a calendar event, and prior operating preferences or constraints. These are not isolated pieces of context. They form a connected state that changes as work progresses and context grows. In this talk, I’ll show why knowledge graphs, context graphs, and GraphRAG provide a better foundation for OpenClaw-style assistants. Knowledge graphs capture durable entities and relationships. Context graphs capture the operational layer assistants usually lose, including actions, decision traces, provenance, and recency. GraphRAG turns that structure into task-time context by combining graph traversal, semantic retrieval, and tool use. Attendees will leave with practical patterns for schema design, retrieval routing, and evaluation, plus a concrete blueprint for assistants that remember more than the last prompt and retrieve more than the nearest chunk.
Speaker
VP of Developer Relations, Neo4j
Stephen Chin is VP of Developer Relations at Neo4j, program chair and board member for the LF AI & Data Foundation, and author of numerous titles including the upcoming GraphRAG: The Definitive Guide for O'Reilly. He has given keynotes and main stage talks at numerous conferences around the world including AI Engineer Summit, AI DevSummit, Open Source Summit, Devoxx, Jfokus, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and GIDS. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done evangelism tours in Europe, Japan, and Brazil, interviewing developers in their natural habitat. When he is not traveling, he enjoys teaching kids how to do AI, embedded, and robot programming together with his daughters.
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- AI : Learned Execution Graphs for Real-Time Anomaly Detection & Drift Classification in APIsThursday, July 2 · 1:30 PM – 1:50 PM · Track 5
For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
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- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
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