James Webb

James Webb

Engineering Manager of Custom Apps and AI at Skechers

James is an Engineering Manager of Custom Applications and GenAI at Skechers. He is the former CTO and Founder of sentiment analysis startup Comb Analytics and has been featured in Forbes, Inc., and MSN. His career spans over a decade of engineering and tech lead roles at companies including Disney, Native Instruments, and Antares.

Talks

Data Con LA 2026

    The RAG Tax

    Lightning Talks

    My team built a RAG over a product catalog and it was right more than nine times out of ten - close enough to seem right, but wrong enough to kill user trust. The takeaway: if your data has a schema, skip the embeddings and give your agent a structured query tool instead.

    https://youtu.be/hSSMkanmjCE?t=6