Adopting Agentic: Software Engineering for the AI Age

30 June 2026 | 5pm–9pm

Techspace, London EC2

The moment everything changes

AI is transforming the speed and nature of software delivery — not just as a tool that assists developers, but as an active participant in the engineering process. The focus must shift from augmenting developers with AI tools, to building the processes and environments where AI-assisted development 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

Chris Parsons

CTO & Founder

Vision for an AI-First Product Organisation

When AI makes code cheap to produce, what happens to the organisations built to produce it? Drawing on Goldratt's Theory of Constraints and hands-on work with engineering leaders, this talk explores the structural shifts underway as coding stops being the bottleneck, and the central choice every engineering organisation now faces.

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.

Richard Thorpe

Head of Engineering, FE fundinfo

Hard, honest, in progress: agentic development in the trenches

Eighteen months ago FE fundinfo went all in on agentic development. Today 95% of engineers use AI every week and 68% of merged pull requests are agent authored. The journey looked nothing like the neat adoption curve.

Eighteen months ago we went all in on agentic development at FE fundinfo. Today 95% of our engineers use AI every week and 68% of merged pull requests are agent authored. The journey looked nothing like the neat adoption curve.

In this talk I share three stories from the trenches: the in-house tool we built, shut down and still count among our best decisions, the adoption plateau that looked like failure, and the leaders who emerged from places nobody predicted.

Chris Price

Principal Architect, Scott Logic

Why you shouldn't add MCP to an arcade machine

A fast-paced dive into hacking a classic coin-pusher arcade machine: wiring it up to AI, adding remote control through VS Code, and discovering what happens when cutting-edge tools meet old-school hardware. Expect unexpected challenges, creative engineering, and the unmistakable thrill of an experiment that probably shouldn't work.

Dive into the secret world of arcade machines as Chris hacks a classic coin-pusher, wiring it up to AI and unleashing remote control through Visual Studio Code. Discover the ingenious tricks behind game design, the wild challenges of blending hardware, firmware, and cutting-edge AI, and see how modern tools can transform old-school tech into a playground for creative experimentation. Get ready for a fast-paced journey where engineering meets innovation and nothing is quite what it seems!

Rhea Sam

AI Adoption Specialist, Valtech

Build Boldly - AI Adoption in Engineering

Rhea explores AI adoption from the frontline, where technology meets the humans building it. This session is for engineering audiences navigating what AI actually means for how they work, not just what tools they use.

We start with the real question: as AI reshapes the landscape, what does engineering actually look like today and where is it heading?

This session goes beyond theory to examine the people and change behaviour driving or stalling AI adoption in engineering teams. When teams act from fear, they build defensively. When they see AI as an opportunity, they build boldly. The difference isn't capability — it's mindset.

You'll be introduced to a practical framework for embedding AI through trained practitioners who experiment, validate, and scale what works, and how leaders can set direction while practitioners make it reality on the ground.