Developer congress in Berlin puts enterprise AI deployment in focus
WeAreDevelopers drew 15,000 people to Berlin as major vendors framed AI software development around production use, security and scale.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
3 min read
WeAreDevelopers drew 15,000 attendees to CityCube Berlin for its World Congress, putting enterprise AI development in production at the center of the three-day event. The gathering underscored a shift in the software industry from experiments with AI coding tools toward questions about security, infrastructure, workflow design and scale.
The congress ran from July 8 to 10 under the patronage of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation. Organizers said the event brought more than 500 speakers and technology leaders from NVIDIA, Amazon, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Atlassian, SAP, Salesforce and IBM, among others.
Sead Ahmetović, chief executive and co-founder of WeAreDevelopers, said the tone had changed from last year’s focus on prototypes and proofs of concept. This year’s discussions, he said, centered on production systems, real users, failures and operating data.
That message fits the current phase of enterprise AI adoption. Companies are no longer only asking whether AI can write or assist with code; they are working through how AI-generated output should be reviewed, secured, measured and integrated into engineering teams.
AI development moves into operations
The program focused on the practical issues that follow when AI becomes part of the software delivery process. Sessions covered evaluation of AI outputs, security for autonomous workflows, infrastructure demands, team alignment and the role of human judgment in software work.
Thomas Pamminger, chief product officer and co-founder of WeAreDevelopers, said developers’ work is changing as agents take on more code-writing tasks. In his view, engineers will spend more time defining intent, assessing results and designing collaboration between people and software agents.
Several senior executives used the event to describe how they see AI reshaping engineering organizations. Thomas Dohmke, co-founder and chief executive of Entire and former GitHub chief executive, spoke about rebuilding the software development lifecycle for agent-to-agent and agent-to-human work. Atlassian’s Taroon Mandhana argued that alignment has become a bigger engineering constraint than coding itself.
NVIDIA Chief Technology Officer Michael Kagan discussed infrastructure for AI systems, while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels spoke about engineering culture and the path from difficult technical ideas to systems used at scale. Other participants included executives from adidas, Vercel, SAP, Sentry, Salesforce and IBM.
Vendors use event for product previews
The event also served as a stage for product announcements tied to AI development. Entire introduced a preview of its distributed Git network, designed to mirror repositories across regions so AI coding agents can clone and pull code with fewer limits tied to centralized hosting.
Google Cloud announced the public preview of Cloud Run sandboxes, a runtime environment for executing untrusted code and AI agent workloads. Bright Data launched Scraper Studio, a platform that turns plain-language prompts into web scraping APIs intended to produce structured output.
The expo covered 40,000 square meters and featured more than 200 partners, according to the organizers. Participants included NVIDIA, Microsoft, GitHub, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Atlassian, SAP, Salesforce, Twilio, Deutsche Bank, GitLab, Cloudflare and IBM.
The WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin remains the company’s flagship event, billed by the organizers as the world’s largest gathering for developers, AI builders and technology leaders. Its next announced stops are San Jose, California, from September 23 to 25, and Bengaluru, India, from November 25 to 26, as part of the company’s 2026 program.