Angie Jones: The 25-Patent IBM Master Inventor Teaching AI How to Behave
Let me tell you about Angie Jones.
You know how a lot of us are scared of AI agents taking over? Angie Jones is one of the Black women who gets to decide how that world gets built — and taught. She’s the VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, where she helps shape the standards for the autonomous AI systems that are about to change how everyone works.
And this is not her first rodeo. Angie is the woman who invented Test Automation University, the free platform that taught a generation of developers how to test software properly. She’s an IBM Master Inventor with more than 25 patents. Go ahead and read that again: 25 patents.
The Work
Right now, Angie is guiding how “agentic” AI — the kind that acts on its own — gets designed and adopted responsibly. She’s a headliner at the industry’s big 2026 conferences (AGNTCon and MCPCon), a leading voice around the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and in 2026 she ran a global developer challenge with prizes including an iPhone Pro Max. She teaches, she builds, she sets the tone for a whole emerging field.
Before that, she was VP of Developer Relations at Block (Square), and earlier she founded Test Automation University while at Applitools — making high-level testing education free and open to developers everywhere. She’s trained thousands of engineers across the globe.
The Roots
Born in New Orleans, Angie went to Marion Abramson Senior High School — and here’s the detail that gets me: she started college as a business major, took one C++ course, and switched to computer science on the spot. That one class changed her whole life.
She got her B.S. in computer science from Tennessee State University, an HBCU, and her M.S. from North Carolina State. She’s worked at IBM, Teradata, LexisNexis, Twitter, NCR, and more. Everywhere she lands, she leaves the field more open, more taught, more human.
Why It Matters
Here’s the thing: the AI revolution doesn’t just need builders. It needs someone deciding how it gets taught, how it gets governed, who gets in. Angie Jones is that someone — a Black woman from New Orleans holding the door open so the next generation of agents get built by people who look like the rest of us.
That one C++ course. Think about what one door can do.
Quick facts:
- VP of Developer Experience, Agentic AI Foundation (left Block)
- IBM Master Inventor · 25+ patents
- Founded Test Automation University — free software-testing education at scale
- Headliner, AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026
- B.S. Tennessee State University (HBCU) · M.S. NC State
