PlatformCon 2026 Spotlights Agentic Platform Engineering | The Platform Engineering Show Ep 14

" Heads up, this is a special edition, short version. Little preview of what's going to come up this week over at PlatformCon. Luca, hey, I know you're out in Sicily, but you're about to get on your horse and ride, right?

You got a busy week. Yes. So we're going to be in London starting on Monday.

So just for context for everybody, so PlatformCon is the flagship event of the Platform Engineering community. It goes the full week next week, so 22nd to the 26th of June. And you have the virtual program that runs Monday to Friday.

We have all the virtual talks. These are 15 minutes pre-recorded talks. We have 300 of them.

It's crazy. We have the virtual workshops. So every day, I think there's about 10 virtual workshops and showcases that people can join live, ask questions, hands-on coding, whatever they want to do.

And that also runs Monday to Friday. And then we have the two live days, which are really the two jewels in the crown. There's London on Tuesday and New York on Thursday.

And then on Thursday night, we're also going to have the closing party, the little house of cube closing party for the New York folks. We're expecting about 1,000 people in London, 700 or so in New York. And yeah, we're excited.

It's going to be packed, just back-to-back stuff. Lots of new formats as well. So we have five concurrent tracks at each live day.

There's the main stage, there's round tables, there's hands-on live day workshops, there's roundtable conversations with analysts. Lot of stuff. Look, I feel like I got to mention, I'm going to be doing one of these sessions in New York.

I'm actually doing something on the vulnerability apocalypse, the Mythos glass swing and all that. And I've got a killer panel. I got my friend John Willis coming in, who's obviously all over this.

Ian Amit, the CEO of Gabach, but I know Ian for years. He's a really well-respected security person. We also have a former CISO from down in Wall Street and Google's cloud security director and Mandy Walls from PagerDuty.

So it's going to be a great panel to check out. Luca, I'm going to focus in on New York because that's the one I'm going at. That one's at the Convene Convention Center.

Are there any tickets left at this point? There's very few tickets left. com.

There's the live day New York page. You can still get tickets up until... I think we might close them by Tuesday because I think we're very close to selling out, but go check that out.

You can get the very late bird tickets. But those are still available, yes. And then Kelsey Hightower is in person in New York, right?

Yeah, Kelsey Hightower is there. We have Caroline Wong also- Yeah ... friend from the of the TechShop.

Yeah. Really good friend. And you're bringing John Willis, another tier one, and there's a few more.

We also have tried to bring a lot of enterprise practitioners on the stage this year. We have Jay Moran, for example, from Fiserv, and a bunch of others across different panels to really... Ultimately, PlatformCon, I think, is really becoming one of the enterprise practitioner stops of the years.

And we really wanted to focus on that. Like enterprise great stuff. Ultimately, obviously, the kind of fil rouge across the entire event is AI, the agentic enterprise, and really how platform engineering is the key enabler for AI adoption in the enterprise.

That's going to be our opening keynote together with Casper. And we're also announcing the book, our book, there next week. And really that's going to be the big focus.

Like how do you ultimately use well-designed platforms to adopt, and really kind of go up the agentic ladder inside the enterprise. And ultimately, how platform engineers are becoming, in our view, one of the key roles, if not the key role, in the AI era. Obviously it's easy to say, well, AI is booming and exploding.

That means AI engineers or AIX, whatever the role of du jour is going to be the main beneficiary. But what we believe is actually enterprises are quickly realizing, hey, if I want to move from this impressive day zero demo to something that's actually day 100 ready, enterprise grade and scalable and production ready, I need a well-designed platform. And they're quickly realizing, okay, platform engineers and platform teams are actually the hot people here.

And not only within IT organizations. I think we're quickly realizing the agent infrastructure that platform engineers need to build and maintain can be used to support not only app dev teams and IT orgs, but really any sort of domain specific apps and stuff in sales, legal, marketing, content, whatever. And so- Security.

Yeah. And not to make it all about me, but back to my talk, that's really the point of this is it's the platform engineer, so we have to be responsible now increasingly for security, for remediation, and all of these things. Luca, I don't want to confuse people.

If you want to go to the in-person event in New York, be there in person, yes, there's a few tickets left. But if you're not going to go there, but you'd still want to participate and actually participate in the whole week, you could still register for the virtual event and get the full London and New York as well as the rest of the week's sessions. It's something like 300 sessions.

Exactly. com, get your free ticket. It's free.

And you're still going to access all the 300 virtual talks, 60 plus virtual webinars and workshops, sorry. And we will be recording main stage in both London and New York and then post it, we're hoping even throughout the week maybe, but certainly the week after. Luca, you've got a busy week ahead of you though there, sounds like.

Oh yeah. It's going to be really intense. But I can't wait, honestly.

And we also have some really cool announcements that we're going to make spanning from community activities and new initiatives and new events and new brands that we're rolling out. And also just really a lot of brand new thought leadership. We took really our time the last six months to formulate our opinion and our view on how AI and platform engineering converging, and I think we have some pretty cool stuff to show.

The proof will be in the pudding. Check it out. com.

Yes. People could go and that's your starting off point. Luca, I know you got to run.

Yes. Family and stuff. I will see you next week for anyone watching- See you in New York.

I can't wait ... next time. All right.

I can't wait. "