For twenty years, QCon has tracked the industry's major inflections. As the conference marks its 20th anniversary with its 2026 events, the editorial stance remains consistent: sessions are curated by senior engineers, focusing on what has actually worked (and failed) in production. The upcoming programs for QCon London (March 16-19) and QCon San Francisco (November 16-20) apply this lens to a new set of compounding decisions: moving AI from experiment to reliable production and validating the ROI of platform engineering.
AI is no longer a research experiment or a novelty in the IDE: it is part of the software delivery pipeline. Teams are learning that integrating AI into production is less about model performance and more about architecture, process, and accountability. In this article series, we examine what happens after the proof of concept and how AI changes the way we build, test, and operate systems.
Software Architecture and Design Trends Report 2025 This report explores how architects are adapting to a world shaped by AI. As large language models (LLMs) become commonplace, attention is turning toward small, specialized models, agentic systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as practical design patterns. Architects are now being asked to balance efficiency, quality, sustainability, and decentralized decision-making. Culture and Methods Trends Report 2025 This report highlights a parallel tension.
How to Build and Deploy Agentic Systems Paige Bailey, DevRel Lead of GenAI at Google Agentic systems are emerging as a key paradigm in how we design intelligent applications that can reason, act, and adapt in dynamic environments. In this interactive workshop, Paige Bailey will introduce the foundational concepts behind agentic systems and demonstrate how to build them using CrewAI and Google's Gemini APIs in Google Colab.
In 2026, the pace of generative AI innovation-alongside new models for content creation, curation, and monetisation-poses profound questions about the future of publishing. Should publishers see AI as a rival reshaping audience behaviour and value chains, or as an ally enhancing efficiency, creativity, and growth? To explore this tension, ExchangeWire convened an expert panel of industry leaders spanning publishing, ad tech, and AI innovation. Together, they shared their perspectives on how the relationship between publishers and AI will evolve over the next 12 months.
Executives increasingly believe AI will reshape their businesses, but many large organizations are still stuck at proofs of concept. McKinsey's 2025 State of AI report shows widespread experimentation, but real business value is being seen by only a small set of "high performers." 23% of respondents report their organizations are scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in their enterprises, but the use of agents is not yet widespread.
Rocket.new, an Indian startup building an AI-powered app development platform, has raised $15 million in a seed round led by Salesforce Ventures to take on viral vibe-coding rivals like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt by letting users build full, production-ready apps from natural-language prompts rather than just quick prototypes. Accel and Together Fund joined Salesforce Ventures in the all-equity seed round, which comes only three months after Rocket.new launched its platform in beta in June.
