Adopting Agentic: Software Engineering for the AI Age
Event date: 30 June 2026
| 5pm–9pm
Techspace, London EC2
The moment everything changes
AI is changing everything about the way we approach software engineering and product development. The technology has reached an inflection point, and the focus must shift from augmenting developers with AI tools, to creating the environment in which AI can truly succeed.
We need to reshape our processes: away from ones designed around human strengths and weaknesses, towards new ones shaped around the strengths and weaknesses of AI. There are a great many important questions that we don’t have answers to – yet.
Join us for an evening of talks from practitioners and conversations with your peers to share experiences, learn together, and start forming a picture of what our future looks like.
Hear from the practitioners
Most AI conversations at engineering events focus on tools, models, and what's coming next. This talk asks a harder question: when AI makes artefacts cheap to produce, what happens to the organisations we built to produce them?
Goldratt's Theory of Constraints tells us that speeding up one part of a system doesn't make the system faster; it moves the bottleneck somewhere else. If you've made coding faster but your organisation isn't shipping faster, coding wasn't the constraint. The queue has simply moved somewhere else, and in many organisations it's getting longer.
Drawing on hands-on work with engineering leaders at companies from 30 to 300 people, I'll share what's happening to team structures as coding stops being the bottleneck. The talk covers the central choice every engineering organisation faces right now, between hybridisation (AI-powered solo contributors) and amplification (smaller, smarter teams), and why those paths lead somewhere different.
Rhea explores the frontline of AI adoption where technology meets human transformation. She'll unpack why mindset shapes action: when we act from fear, we build defensively; when we see AI as opportunity, we build boldly.
This session goes beyond theory to introduce the Champions model: a practical framework for embedding AI into workspaces through trained practitioners who experiment, validate, and scale what works. You'll see how top-down standards and bottom-up community adoption work together to cross the GenAI divide.
Whether you're leading AI transformation or navigating it from within a team, you'll leave with actionable insights for the people side of AI adoption.
