The software industry has officially moved past the question of whether AI can build software, focusing instead on how to build it well, securely, and at scale.
WeAreDevelopers World Congress, the world’s largest gathering for developers and technology leaders, drew 15,000 attendees to CityCube Berlin from July 8 to 10, 2026.
The event brought together more than 500 speakers and senior executives from NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Google Cloud, SAP, and IBM.
“Last year, much of the industry was still asking itself what could be built with AI,” said Sead Ahmetović, CEO and Co-Founder of WeAreDevelopers. “We saw pilots, prototypes and concepts.”
Ahmetović added: “This year, we saw working production stories: real systems, real users, real failures, real numbers. As an industry, we have moved from asking whether we can do this to asking how we do it well, securely, and at scale.”
The congress was held under the patronage of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, with Federal Minister Dr. Karsten Wildberger appearing on the Mainstage to discuss Europe’s digital future.
Thomas Pamminger, CPO and Co-Founder of WeAreDevelopers, noted that the developer’s role is fundamentally shifting as AI agents take over more of the coding workload.
“When agents take over the writing of code, understanding the system becomes the developer’s real job,” Pamminger said. “The value shifts from typing lines to defining intent, judging output and designing how humans and agents work together.”
Thomas Dohmke, CEO and Co-Founder of Entire and former CEO of GitHub, argued that the software development lifecycle must be rebuilt to support agent-to-agent and agent-to-human collaboration.
Taroon Mandhana, CTO AI and Teamwork at Atlassian, told attendees that alignment, not coding, is fast becoming engineering’s most critical bottleneck in an AI-driven environment.
NVIDIA CTO Michael Kagan shared his perspective on the infrastructure powering modern AI systems, while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels reflected on the engineering culture that turns seemingly impossible challenges into production systems used by millions.
Figma Chief Design Officer Loredana Crisan made a compelling case for human judgment as a lasting competitive advantage in an era of increasingly capable AI tools.
“AI can make something look finished in seconds. But finished-looking is not the same as good,” Crisan said. “Taste becomes even more important. Not just for the aesthetics, but as a competitive advantage.”
The congress also served as a platform for major technology announcements, with Dohmke unveiling Entire’s distributed Git network, now in preview, which mirrors repositories across regions to eliminate rate limits and latency issues for AI coding agents.
Google Cloud announced the public preview of Cloud Run sandboxes, a secure runtime environment purpose-built for executing untrusted code and AI agent workloads, during the event.
Bright Data launched Scraper Studio, an AI-powered platform that converts plain-English prompts into production-ready web scraping APIs designed for AI agent workflows.
“The product finally gives AI agents reliable and structured real-time information from the web: no more blocking, no messy HTML, just clean, consistent and compact Markdown or JSON output,” said Ariel Shulman, CPO of Bright Data.
The 40,000-square-meter expo featured more than 200 partner organizations, including Deutsche Bank, Twilio, GitLab, and Cloudflare, among many other prominent technology firms.
WeAreDevelopers will next convene in San Jose, California, from September 23 to 25, before heading to Bengaluru, India, from November 25 to 26 for the final stop on its 2026 global circuit.
“With Berlin, San Jose and Bengaluru, we are taking this conversation to three continents,” said Benjamin Ruschin, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of WeAreDevelopers. “The focus stays the same everywhere: giving developers, AI builders and technology executives a place to exchange what actually works.”
