People I Met at AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026
Conferences are as much about the people as the protocols. Over three days in Amsterdam — the AGNTCon PreDay meetup at Adyen and two full days of AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe at RAI Amsterdam — I met the people actually building the agentic stack: protocol maintainers, platform engineers, developer advocates, and community organizers. Here’s who I connected with.
Keynote Speakers
- Angie Jones — VP of Developer Experience, Agentic AI Foundation. Opened both Day 1 and Day 2, framing the conference around agentic AI as a production technology, not a future one.
- David Soria Parra — Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic, and co-creator of the Model Context Protocol. Announced MCP’s move to a stateless core.
- Dexter Horthy — CEO & Co-founder, HumanLayer. Coined “context engineering”; spoke on the state of the software factory.
- Maarten Grootendorst — Member of Technical Staff, Google DeepMind, creator of BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz.
- Shaun Smith — MCP and Transport Working Group Maintainer, Hugging Face. Deep dive into stateless MCP in production.
- Clare Liguori — Senior Principal Engineer, AWS, and core MCP specification maintainer.
- Frédéric Barthelet — CTO & Co-founder, Alpic. Presented on MCP vs. WebMCP vs. CLI alongside Dominic Farolino.
- Dominic Farolino — Editor of the WebMCP specification, Google.
- Idit Levine — Founder & CEO, Solo.io.
Panelists
MCP Challenges & Opportunities panel:
- Sam Morrow — GitHub
- Shaun Smith — Hugging Face
- Shub Argha — Arcade
Agentic AI in the Wild panel (AGNTCon PreDay, Adyen):
- Brian Vermeer — Developer Advocate, Snyk
- Carlos Mestre del Pino — Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft
- Alessandro Stefouli-Vozza — Technical Evangelist, Microsoft
- Carly Richmond — Principal Developer Advocate and Manager, Elastic
- Risto Leesmae — Developer AI Experience Lead, Adyen
Breakout Session Speakers
- Christian Posta — Chief Architect, Solo.io. Tackled agent identity in distributed systems.
- Willem Berroubache — Orange. Presented on the reality of multi-agent orchestration in production.
- Liad Yosef — MCP Apps. Presented on applications built for both humans and agents.
- Vyshnavi Gadamsetti and Sebastian Wennemers — SAP. Presented on agent catalog discovery and Open Resource Discovery.
AGNTCon PreDay Hosts (Adyen, Amsterdam)
- Dana Fine — Global Open Source and Community Manager, Qodo. Moderated the PreDay panel.
- Kunal Kushwaha — WeMakeDevs
- Ayodeji Ogundare — Adyen
- Sahar Mor — Bond AI
- Nnenna Ndukwe — Developer Relations, Qodo. Spoke on AI-powered code review.
- Liran Tal — Senior Director, Developer Relations, Snyk.
- Gbadebo (Debo) Bello — Devrel/DX Community, Postman.
Why This Matters
Every protocol and product announced at AGNTCon + MCPCon has a name — or several — behind it. What struck me across all three days was how small this community still is relative to its impact: the same handful of people building MCP, A2A, AGENTS.md, and the surrounding tooling are the ones you run into at the coffee line, the expo floor, and the PreDay networking session. If you’re building on the agentic stack, these are the people worth following.
