Having joined the AI Engineer Conference Series in both SF and NY, I couldn’t resist when I heard that they were in Europe for AI Engineer Paris. Yann Leger and the Koyeb team did a great job hosting.

Some reflections:

2025 isn’t the year of Agents. 2025-35 is the decade of Agents

It is easy to get caught up in the hype, but broad changes across society take a long time. Semi-autonomous intelligent systems (aka Agents) will no doubt have a profound impact on how society operates, but it is not all going to happen this year. Regardless, I’ll be spending the next decade of my career on the frontier of this wave.

Everyone is building Agents / Agent Studios

Many major Saas providers was launching some kind of “Lovable” builder experience, which validates how we are thinking about our own Sano Agent, which is already proving valuable in its beta testing phase.

Building Agents = Context Engineering

A big theme in the community earlier this year at NY was how to prescriptively validate Agent behaviour with Evals. This time was very different, with a focus on context engineering and being satisfied with ‘vibe-check’ evaluation systems. Making Agents work effectively amounts to making sure they have the right information at the right time. Alberto Castelo Becerra from Shopify shared a wealth of pertinent learnings with us at Sano, including how to distinguish between explicit, implicit, and episodic memory for Agents, as well as how to improve Agent reliability using just-in-time (JIT) tool instructions.

Real-time voice AI is here

Neil Zeghidour at Kyutai shared some state-of-the-art interruptible voice AI that truly made you feel like you were having a real conversation. There are so many novel product experiences to build here once this becomes widespread that it makes my head hurt.

AI Engineer is coming to London next April

swyx ​and Benjamin Dunphy announced that they’re bringing the World Fair to London next April, and I predict that this will be a smashing success. I found so many hungry AI engineering communities in London right now (e.g. AI Tinkerers, Unicorn Mafia, and many more). There is such fertile ground for the community to come together, and I’m looking forward to helping out with that next year.

There is really strong foundational European AI Black Forest Labs, Kyutai and many others are doing some amazing things at the model development level in Europe.

Google is a freight train right now

I was super impressed with the launches shared by Paige Bailey and the whole DeepMind team. Over the last few months, Google has averaged a major launch every five days, and more are on the way. This is truly fearsome to do this at such a scale, and it is a testament to how leadership have stepped up in the global AI battle.

Big shout-out to everyone I saw there!