AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026: Two Days of Real Agentic AI at RAI Amsterdam
Day 1 recap — 2,000+ attendees, keynotes from the co-creator of MCP, and the data that shows agentic AI has already crossed into production.
Yesterday I attended AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe at RAI Amsterdam — the Linux Foundation’s flagship conference on agentic AI and the Model Context Protocol. The tagline says “Where the agent stack is being built” and after walking the floor, I can confirm: this is exactly the right place to be if you want to see how the agentic stack is taking shape.
The Scene: RAI Amsterdam, September 17-18
The event occupies the main auditorium at RAI Amsterdam, complete with professional video cameras, tiered blue theater seating, and the kind of dramatic purple-and-blue lighting that makes every photo look like it belongs on a conference highlight reel. The crowd of 2,000+ attendees represents the full spectrum of the agentic AI ecosystem: open source maintainers, enterprise platform engineers, researchers, and developer advocates from companies like Microsoft, Elastic, AWS, Anthropic, GitHub, and Hugging Face.
The event is co-hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation, with production support from the Linux Foundation. As a media partner, I was on the ground capturing the key moments — from the opening keynotes to the panel discussions to the hallway conversations where the real insights live.
Keynote 1: Welcome — Angie Jones, VP at Agentic AI Foundation
9:00 AM | Auditorium (Ground Floor)
The morning kicked off with Angie Jones, Vice President of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation. Angie — a master inventor with 27 patents and a renowned international keynote speaker — set the tone for the two days ahead.
Her message was clear: the era of “AI agents as a future technology” is over. The era of “AI agents as a production technology” has begun. Every decision the conference would return to — from security to observability to interoperability — was framed through the lens of production readiness.
Keynote 2: MCP and the Era of Connectivity — David Soria Parra, Co-creator of MCP, Anthropic
9:18 AM | Auditorium (Ground Floor)
Fresh off the welcome, David Soria Parra — Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and co-creator of the Model Context Protocol — took the stage for what was arguably the most anticipated session of Day 1.
David’s background is a fascinating primer for anyone building on top of MCP: former core developer for PHP, contributor to Git and Mercurial, former engineering leader at Meta/Facebook, entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, and now at Anthropic driving MCP forward. His talk — “MCP and the Era of Connectivity” — was a masterclass in how a protocol designed to solve a narrow problem (connecting AI assistants to external data) evolved into the most adopted standard in the agentic stack.
The key announcement: MCP moves to a stateless core, with a new extensions framework, authorization changes, and a clear migration path for existing clients and servers. This is the kind of evolution that will define agentic AI infrastructure for years to come.
Keynote: State of the Software Factory — Dexter Horthy, CEO, HumanLayer
9:41 AM | Auditorium (Ground Floor)
Dexter Horthy, CEO and co-founder of HumanLayer, stepped onto the stage next. Dex coined the term “context engineering” in April 2025 and has keynoted two AI Engineer conferences with talks totaling over 1 million views on YouTube. His background — building lunar exploration tooling for NASA researchers in high school, then 10+ years in the Kubernetes/Infra space before getting into AI — gives his perspective a rare blend of infrastructure depth and AI-first thinking.
His talk on the “State of the Software Factory” was a reality check wrapped in practical advice: if your agentic system is producing “slop,” the problem isn’t the model — it’s the architecture. Dex walked through how teams at scale are structuring their agentic workflows to maintain quality while shipping velocity, with a particular focus on human-in-the-loop patterns and review gates.
Keynote: Inside AI Agents — Maarten Grootendorst, Google DeepMind
3:04 PM | Auditorium (Ground Floor)
After the lunch break, Maarten Grootendorst — Member of Technical Staff at Google DeepMind and creator of BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz — took the stage. Maarten’s unique background spans organizational psychology, clinical psychology, and data science, which gives his technical talks a distinctly human perspective.
His keynote, “Inside AI Agents: Offloading Human Tasks”, explored how agentic systems are changing the way we think about workflow automation — not by replacing human judgment, but by offloading the mechanical, repetitive, and rule-bound tasks that consume human attention. He demonstrated how open-source tooling (his own libraries included) is making it possible for teams to build agents that augment rather than replace.
Panel: MCP Challenges & Opportunities
4:10 PM | Auditorium (Ground Floor)
The afternoon closed with a panel tackling the hard questions about MCP in production:
- Sam Morrow (GitHub) — on MCP adoption at scale
- Angie Jones (Agentic AI Foundation) — on governance and standards
- Shaun Smith (Hugging Face) — on the stateless MCP transport evolution
- Shub Argha (Arcade) — on developer experience and tooling
The discussion covered the gap between “MCP works in my prototype” and “MCP runs in my production environment” — a gap that’s narrowing fast as the spec matures.
The Data: Agentic AI Is Already in Production
Throughout the day, the 2024 AAIF Member Pulse Survey (n=186) results were displayed on screens between sessions. The numbers tell a story that’s worth repeating:
| Metric | Finding |
|---|---|
| In production today | 81% (51% at production scale) |
| Use or evaluate MCP | 89% (most adopted agent standard) |
| Build on open-source tooling | 78% (vs. 22% naming closed-source) |
| Run multi-agent systems | 60% (50% across more than one stack) |
The Open Standards Stack — Top 10 Adopted
The survey also ranked the open standards and protocols gaining traction:
- MCP — 89%
- Skills — 69%
- A2A — 57%
- AGENTS.md — 51%
- AGNTCY — 37%
- Agentgateway — 15%
- ACP (Client) — 12%
- Goose — 10%
- ACP (Commerce) — 9%
- x402 — 8%
Oversight Is a Design Choice
The survey also surfaced how teams are thinking about governance:
- 66% human-on-the-loop
- 63% bounded autonomy
- 23% fully autonomous
Deployment Is Hybrid by Default
- 85% public cloud
- 56% on-prem
- 42% local/desktop
- 19% edge
The Women + Non-Binary Community Gathering
One of the most notable side events was the “Women + Non-Binary Community Gathering” (13:35–14:45 CEST, Emerald Lounge, 1st Floor). This lunch-time networking session, hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation, brought together women and non-binary leaders in the agentic AI community for conversation over food.
Diamond Sponsor: Solo.io
The conference also acknowledged Solo.io as its Diamond Sponsor, with a dedicated presentation on the main stage.
What This Means for Builders
Three takeaways from Day 1 that every team shipping agentic AI should internalize:
Agentic AI is not a future technology — it’s a production technology. 81% of teams building agents have them in production. The questions have shifted from “if” to “how reliable.”
The open standards stack is winning. MCP at 89% adoption is just the start. The stack of protocols and standards — MCP, Skills, A2A, AGENTS.md — represents a community-driven path to interoperability that no single vendor can own.
Oversight isn’t overhead — it’s architecture. 66% of teams are adopting human-on-the-loop patterns. The agentic stack that wins won’t be the one that removes humans, but the one that thoughtfully integrates them.
Coming Up: Day 2
Tomorrow’s agenda includes talks on agentic security, observability, and production deployments. I’ll be back on the floor capturing the key moments.
Announcements & Product Launches
Throughout the event, the Linux Foundation and sponsors announced several key developments:
MCP Graduates to Enterprise Infrastructure
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is getting its biggest update since launch — introducing a stateless core, new extensions, stronger enterprise authorization, and a formal deprecation policy. MCP co-creator David Soria Parra discussed these changes on Day 1, noting that the protocol’s move to a stateless architecture addresses the scaling concerns that have prevented adoption in enterprise environments.
Envoy AI Gateway Becomes Agent Router, Joins AAIF
Envoy AI Gateway is now Agent Router and is joining the Agentic AI Foundation as a hosted project. Developers connect to models and tools through an OpenAI-compatible API and ready-to-use MCP endpoints, while platform teams manage providers, credentials, quotas, routing, and failover behind the scenes.
Agentic AI Foundation Welcomes 57 New Members
The Foundation announced 57 new members, including major financial services players and APAC leaders. New Gold Members include Alibaba, Visa, and Wells Fargo, with 33 Silver and 21 Associate Members across financial services, enterprise technology, research, and global technology organizations.
A2A Joins the Open Agentic Stack
Agent2Agent (A2A), the open standard for inter-agent communication, is joining the Agentic AI Foundation as a hosted project. This fills a critical gap in the agentic stack — while MCP handles agent-to-tool connectivity, A2A standardizes agent-to-agent communication.
MCPA Certification Launched
The Agentic AI Foundation launched the Model Context Protocol Associate (MCPA) certification — a foundational, vendor-neutral credential validating engineering and platform builders’ understanding of MCP concepts, architecture, and implementation considerations.
Other Sponsor Announcements
Additional product launches from sponsoring companies included:
- Traefik Labs: Sovereign Trust Plane for verifiable AI agent governance
- WSO2: Agent Manager for sovereign AI governance across enterprise agent sprawl
- Grape Up: Aiboostr — an open-source AI governance and orchestration platform with EU AI Act compliance and private LLM support
- Omnys: Joined as Gold Sponsor, showcasing the OMNYS AI Platform with native MCP support
- AgentCat: Launched the first Agent Experience (AX) platform combining agent analytics, goal detection, and session replay
