Cedric Hurst is the Founder and CEO of Spantree, a Chicago-based engineering consultancy now operating as a business unit of Trifork, the company behind GOTO conferences. Over 15 years he built Spantree into a team known for hard, data-intensive problems: real-time options trading platforms, computer vision and spatial computing systems, and industrial inspection platforms, and large-scale search and data infrastructure.

He now leads technology strategy for Trifork's North American operations. His team at Spantree has gone all-in on agentic development. Every engineer runs a personal AI agent that manages their coding workflows, communications, and project context. Cedric developed Fluent Workshop, an intensive training program that has walked professional engineering teams through the transition from casual AI tool use to agentic development in production.

He has spent the last two years in Claude Code, MCP servers, multi-agent orchestration, and the day-to-day reality of deploying autonomous AI systems in regulated industries. He builds software through late night Discord messages more often than he'd like to admit.