Gene Kim

Welcome to the 24th conference, but the first Enterprise AI Summit.

I'll tell you the amazing story of how this event happened on this incredibly compressed timeframe. But maybe I'll start first by saying, why do I think we're all here? I think it's because we believe vibe coding will reshape technology organizations just like DevOps did, but 100 times bigger and probably faster. We believe vibe coding can massively elevate our ability to achieve organizational goals and do it reliably and safely, maybe. And then three is we believe there's so many looming questions for technology leaders that everyone is facing.

And as my friend Amy Willard, who's on the program committee, who'll be speaking with John Deere, she said, "We all got rebooted at the same time. It doesn't matter whether you're at a foundation AI lab, whether you're at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, a startup, or a 180-year-old technology company. None of us know anything."

So my introduction to this adventure was meeting Steve Yegge in June 2024, and it turns out I've been an admirer of him for over 11 years. I've been quoting his work in the DevOps Handbook and so forth, because he wrote this amazing characterization of a memo by Jeff Bezos, calling it the most audacious memo that Jeff Bezos ever wrote. And it was the kernel of the start of the deconstruction of the Amazon e-commerce monolith, where they went from doing hundreds of deploys a year to maybe 10 deploys a year, where most deployments didn't finish. And so what did they do about it? Jeff Bezos said that all teams must henceforth expose their data and functionality only through APIs, and that's the only way they're able to communicate and coordinate. No backdoors allowed, and he ended the memo by saying, "Seven, thank you and have a nice day." Then Yegge, in his amazing way, said, "Seven is obviously a joke because Bezos doesn't actually care whether you have a good day or not." But the rest of that memo was true. It was all enforced by then Amazon CIO, Rick Dalzell.

And so I want to share with you the moment that really changed my life was in September 2024 — so long ago — where Steve made the offer to pair program with me. And in essentially 47 minutes, we wrote something that I had wanted to write for years. And you can't have something like that happen to you and not have that change your life. And so that's when we started working on the Vibe Coding book together, and I will say this, bar none, this has been the most fun, incredible adventure of my entire lifetime. I felt like I had so much fun working in the DevOps movement, doing the DORA metrics, but nothing can hold a candle to what's happening right now.

And I suspect many of you feel the same way, that this is the most fun that you've had in your entire career. Yes? All right.

So one of the things that I think riveted both Steve and me was this quote from Dr. Eric Meijer, who's here. He's considered by many to be one of the best programming language designers of all time. He was behind Visual Basic, C#, LINQ, Hack. He was around the Haskell community so much. And he said in a talk at the Foo Con conference, he said, "We might be the last generation of developers to write code by hand, so let's have fun doing it." And it was just a startling quote, for sure, but also puzzling, because why would a person who's dedicated his entire life to writing programming languages for humans say that humans might not be in the business of writing code anymore? And he actually makes this incredible claim that says, "Time can be neither generated nor stored. So if we, as programmers, can find a way to save time, we have to take it." It's almost like this moral imperative, and it's hard to argue with that logic.

And so one of the fun adventures that Steve and I were on was having the foreword of the Vibe Coding book written by Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. And he said, "Vibe coding is this inspired term because it evokes this totally different way of coding, but also misleading because it makes it seem unserious or frivolous." But then he goes on to say, at Anthropic, where they pride themselves on having some of the best developers on the planet, it's the only game in town.

And I think many of us are here because, of course, who would want to code by hand with your meat fingers, right, as Kent Beck said, when there's a better way to do this.

So Adrian Cockcroft, someone who also changed my life 12 years ago as he was migrating Netflix to the cloud back in 2009, had this post last summer where he described how back about 12 years ago in the DevOps community, some people called DevOps NoOps, meaning we don't need infrastructure and operations people anymore, which obviously we know isn't true. But he said, in this age of agentic coding, every engineer is like a director of development. So maybe we should call it NoDev, right? It's pretty funny, right?

And I think what he's put his finger on is that DevOps fundamentally reshaped how technology organizations work. If you look at that value stream between product, dev, QA, operations, infrastructure — if you deploy once a year and now you're going to do 10 deploys a day, that changes how QA works, operations works, and infrastructure, security, right? Everyone had to shift left. And I think our suspicion is that whatever reshaping that had, it's going to be at least 100 times bigger and more disruptive when every developer is having tens of agents at their beck and call.

And so I think what made me so excited is that over the last years at the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit, we've had these experience reports from technology leaders showing how much things are changing. So this is Sri Balakrishnan, Head of Technology and Product at Travelopia — it's a $1.5 billion a year travel company. And he said, "You don't need a team of eight to do consequential things anymore. Six developers, a UX person, a product person. It might be just two," right? And they can go further and faster.

Dr. Tapabrata Pal, who led the DevOps movement at Capital One 12 years ago, he's now VP of Architecture at Fidelity, and he gave this amazing experience report about how among many of his responsibilities is the application where you go to ask, of the 20,000 applications that we have at Fidelity Investments, which ones have Log4j? And he had this vision of what the application should look like. And when he asked his team, "Can we build it?" they would say, "Yeah. It will take about eight months, and we need to hire two front-end people." He was like, "Argh." So out of frustration — my words, not his — he vibe coded for five days straight, and that went into production September 19th, 2025, right? So it's now running in production. And so the question he then asked was, "Who's going to help me manage this?" To which his team's response was, "Not me." Except for Swathi, the most junior engineer on the team, and now she's outlearning everybody on the team.

So this conference is really to start trying to figure out what are the patterns, what are the new techniques we need to learn to actually use this amazing new technology at scale. And so this has always been a conference of primarily experience reports. Experience reports always follow this form where leaders say, here's the organization, here's where I fit in, here's how we compete, here's my role, here's the business problem we set out to solve, here's where we started and why, what did we do, what are the outcomes that you should be able to replicate, who got value out of it and why, and then here's the challenges that still remain. And the reason why I love that is that it really does follow the same structure as the scientific method, right? You're stating a hypothesis, you perform the experiment that others can repeat and potentially invalidate. And so the reason why I think this is so important is, as leaders we don't learn from having experts go on stage and telling you what they think you should do, right? We really want to hear from fellow leaders facing similar problems and hearing how they solve problems.

So just in terms of how we got here — and I think the feeling I'm hoping this experience invokes is when we did our first DevOps Enterprise Conference in 2014, the goal was really to show that DevOps could be done not at startups, not just at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Googles, and Microsofts. It could be done in large, complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries. And I think there was a sense in that year, 12 years ago, that absolutely, this was a universal problem, it could be universally applied. And something I take just a tremendous amount of pride in is that over those 12 years, we've had over 700 organizations present across almost every industry vertical. Financial services, manufacturing, public sector, not-for-profits, military agencies — just showing that, hey, here's how we apply it in every part of society.

So why this conference? A Group CTO at a private equity company said to me, "Gene, we're facing the greatest leadership challenge of the last 100 years." My first reaction was like, man, that's a pretty big claim. Can you defend it? And he, over 15 minutes, convinced me. He said, basically, for the last 60-plus years, any leader could inherit the process they were given, take credit for it, right, blame someone else if it didn't work, right, and you could make a career out of doing that. But now, every process we have is wildly and profoundly insufficient, right? Everything is going to break, and every leader is going to have to be forced to rewire, reprocess organizations at a scale we've probably never seen before.

And so here are some of the questions you might have that your fellow colleagues might have. Like John Cutler, famous in the product community, said, "I see a lot of developers vibe coding in single-player mode, in front of their IDE. But what does multiplayer mode look like?" Don't know. What should teams look like when two people can do the work of eight? What does code review processes look like? What happens when the auditors show up? How are you going to prove to them that every human looked at all 8,000 lines of commits, right? Don't know.

And so here's where we get to conferences. So it turns out, if you look in history, some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs and dissemination of knowledge came from conferences. So this is the Royal Society, where Newton and Hooke shared empirical results of puzzling findings leading to the scientific revolution. The Solvay Conference in 1927 is where Einstein hung out with Bohr, and they tried to figure out what became known as quantum — whatever. The theory of E equals MC squared, et cetera.

So we started doing this monthly AI forum, where the goal was to assemble the most switched-on people using AI in anger — both ICs and technology leaders who are just trying to figure out how to use vibe coding to help their organizations win. And we've been doing this every month. It's been an amazing thing. And the problem is that we kept on adding speakers at a rate far higher than even a monthly forum could accommodate. And so the thought was, okay, maybe can we wait till September to do a conference? And the answer we came up with was, profoundly no.

And so my heartiest thanks to Ben Grinnell, Jeff Gallimore, Murray Kim, and team, where we tried to figure out how do we do smaller conferences more frequently, right? How can we potentially do them not yearly, but even quarterly — or some people are going to faint when I say this — but monthly. How can we do that? And I'm so delighted that we have leaders from not startups, but organizations that have been around for centuries — Netflix, Block, John Deere, Westpac — sharing what they're learning.

And so this led to Amy Willard saying, "We all got rebooted at the same time."

So my profound thanks to the program committee who made this all happen, because in four weeks, we got a program together, and four weeks ago, we announced the conference. And so I'm so glad that you're all here, essentially on four weeks' notice. And so I want to thank all of you for helping make this event happen. So a round of applause for all of you.

So I want to thank you, our sponsors, and I'm going to now introduce Bryan Wald, Field CTO at GitLab, who helped organize this and will serve as our co-MC throughout the next two days.

Bryan Wald

I am Bryan Wald, the Field CTO at GitLab, and I've had the honor and privilege to be one of the emcees of this event.

And so, as I think through this — and as Gene mentioned, a month ago he came to us and said, "Hey, we want to do this event, just had this idea last night. Let's put this together." He asked us to be a sponsor of this and to help with the event. I said, "Sure, yeah," thinking this would be like a meetup-style, like 50-person thing — but four or five times the size that we had here. So just a quick round of applause for Gene, IT Revolution, and all of the sponsors as part of this as well.

Yeah. And so, the past two days I have been in San Jose, and we've been in a smaller AI leadership forum together with Gene and a number of leaders in the industry. And we were talking about a lot of the concepts, a lot of the ideas around AI that we're going to be talking about at this conference today and tomorrow.

And one of the things that really struck me as we were having these conversations — these are people who I think really changed the industry, started to make differences in how we've done things through DevOps and all the changes that have gone through that. And I just felt like when we were having these conversations, the strategy, the way we've approached this new world with AI has just been incredible to see. And one thing that really stood out to me was a lot of these leaders, a lot of these people who I've looked up to, have said, "Yeah, we don't really know, and this is a conversation that we need to have as a community and start trying to figure these things out together." And that's amazing, and that's what we're coming here together to do today as well. And you're going to see a lot of these people that I was meeting with this week on stage today.

So needless to say, I'm super excited about this event and looking forward to working with you all and working together on this.

The one thing that I love about Gene's conferences — and this is the first AI one I've been to, but I've been to some of the DevOps summits in the past — is that there's a true kind of bias towards action. And what I mean by that is, you have these events, and a lot of times you go to events and you hear great stuff and you kind of move on. The events that he puts together here are ones that actually bring stuff back out into the community and actually get implemented into enterprises as things that are important for the success and the momentum of the industry. Which has been really amazing, and I felt that as the Field CTO at GitLab. Been there for eight years and in DevOps for 15 years. A lot of the principles that have come out of these conversations, all of you getting together, thinking about things, and bringing that back to the industry has really changed the game. And so looking forward to seeing what happens here with AI and how we're going to do that again and again.

Couple of quick housekeeping items that we need to go through here before we get started. If you don't have the conference schedule and speakers, you can get it on the event website or with the QR code there.

And as we go through each of these sessions, if you would, please do give us some feedback for the speakers. It helps them, helps the event team, so we can make sure these are better and better over time.

If you're not on the internet, they're floating around here for you to connect to that.

Also, we have a Slack channel — so have conversations here live, but obviously if there are questions, things that you wanted to talk about, or start threads inside the Slack channel and ongoing partnerships, please do that there as well.

And last, after today, following directly after the event today, we'll have food, we'll have a game night here, which will be awesome. We want you all to come together and have fun. There's a special build challenge, Vibe Code gaming challenge, that we will announce more details around lunchtime about what that is. But something that a couple of us with Gene have been vibe coding up — this game that we'd love for you all to partake in. You can see how your fellow colleagues and others are using vibe coding and do it in a fun gaming fashion.

So that is all for now. I think we'll hand it back to Gene to introduce our first speaker.

Gene Kim

Thank you, Bryan.