AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026

Registration & Badge Pick-Up

Registration · Oct 22, 2026 · 07:30–19:05 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Welcome to AGNTCon + MCPCon North America

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:00–09:05 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

• Angie Jones

Opening Remarks

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:05–09:10 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

• Mazin Gilbert

Keynote: Manik Surtani, CTO, Agentic AI Foundation

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:15–09:25 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

• Manik Surtani

Keynote: Tokenomics: Energy to Intelligence to Value

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:25–09:30 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Every autonomous agent you ship is also an autonomous buyer, spending tokens on models, tools, and retries that nobody explicitly approved. But tokens are only half the ledger. At scale the binding constraint is energy, and the metric that matters shifts from tokens consumed to intelligence delivered per watt. Both are the same question: how much useful value are we getting per unit of spend? That question belongs in your design reviews next to latency and reliability, and the discipline to answer it (Tokenomics), has to be neutral, open, and community-built.

• J.R. Storment

Keynote: David Soria Parra

Keynote · Editorial classification · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:30–09:40 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

• David Soria Parra

Keynote: David Soria Parra, Co-creator of MCP, Anthropic

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:30–09:40 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

• David Soria Parra

Keynote: Building the Human-Agent Workplace

Keynote · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:40–09:50 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

The first generation of AI agents lived in isolated chat sessions. But for agents to contribute meaningful work, they need more than a conversation—they need shared context, durable identity, governed access to tools, and clear paths for delegation and review. At Block, we’re building an integrated environment that connects individual agentic development, team collaboration, and a shared capabilities layer for accessing the systems that run our business. In this keynote, we’ll share the architecture and operating model behind that shift, including how people and agents coordinate work, how permissions and identity carry across tools, and how automation and model routing help the system operate at scale.

• Bradley Axen

Coffee Break

Break · Editorial classification · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:55–10:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Solutions Showcase

Not classified · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:55–20:00 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Sponsor Activity: Akamai AI Orchestrator

Other · Oct 22, 2026 · 09:58–10:08 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Transforming AI inference from a centralized bottleneck into an intelligent, globally distributed compute cache that instantly adapts to user demand.

• Du'An Lightfoot

Sponsor Activity: DO NOT give AI agents credentials!

Other · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:10–10:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

How do you stop an AI agent from leaking API Keys, OAuth tokens, or secret credentials? "Hey, here is my API key, can you do this for me" an AI agent can easily ask another agent/API/MCP server. The answer is simple. Don't give them any credentials. So how do they do any meaningful work then? Inject the credentials on egress. In this quick session, we'll look at credential brokering for AI agents and how agentgateways can be used for this.

• Christian Posta

Don't Merge That: An Agentic Approach to Catching Outages at 10,000 PRs a Week

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:20–10:45 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

At Datadog, we ship more than 10,000 pull requests a week. At that scale, human reviewers can't catch every ticking time bomb — the missing timeout that causes a cascading failure, the silent behavioral change that breaks every caller at once, the cold cache that thundering-herds a dependency into the ground. In this talk, we share how we built an agentic review system that catches these patterns automatically, before merge, on every high-risk PR. You'll learn how we combined risk scoring with fine-tuned models, tool-augmented LLM agents, and reflection loops to go from "this looks fine" to "here's the exact line that will page you at 3 AM — and here's the fix." We'll walk through the hard lessons: what makes an LLM a good reliability reviewer, how to keep it focused on outages and not style nits, how reflection loops measurably improve flaws catching quality, and how to wire all of this into a production system your engineers will actually trust. Whether you're building agentic tooling or just trying to scale code review, you'll leave with concrete patterns for putting LLMs on the critical path of your engineering workflow — without losing your oncall's sleep.

• Joris Bonnefoy

Evolution, not Revolution: How MCP is Reshaping OAuth

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:20–10:45 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

The impulse to rewrite the auth stack for AI agents is strong, but we cannot design away the fundamental relationships standards protect. This session explores how MCP is reshaping OAuth—not abandoning it—to meet the ecosystem's unique challenges: The "Unregistered Client" Problem: Traditional OAuth requires pre-registration. MCP breaks this. We’ll see how Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD) allow agents to bring their own identities to arbitrary servers, how it improves on Dynamic Client Registration, and how to mitigate the risks of unregistered clients. Separation of Concerns: Why your MCP server shouldn't be your Authorization Server. We’ll cover how Protected Resource Metadata (RFC 9728) enables dynamic auth server discovery, keeping agents lightweight and security boundaries clean. Enterprise-Managed Authorization: To stop "click-through fatigue," we’ll introduce the Identity Assertion Authorization Grant. This moves consent to the enterprise policy layer, enabling secure, scalable adoption. Join me to secure the agent ecosystem—from discovery to governance—not by reinventing the wheel, but by making incremental improvements to the way it turns.

• Aaron Parecki

Gotta Catch 'Em All: Agent Skills

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:20–10:45 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Right now, developers are collecting Agent Skills like Pokémon.There's skills for planning, testing, reviewing PRs, and searching through documentation. In this session, we'll break down what Agent Skills are, why they're becoming an important layer in agent workflows, and how they give agents repeatable capabilities they can carry across tasks. Then we'll put a few Skills into battle using Entire. You'll see how an agent can search past sessions, trace how a project evolved, uncover previous decisions, connect changes to commits, and rebuild the context behind the code without making you read every transcript yourself.

• Lizzie Siegle

Scaling AI Infrastructure Systems at Meta Scale

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:20–10:45 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Modern AI systems are no longer limited by models alone. They are increasingly constrained by infrastructure scalability, attribution pipelines, reliability, latency, and operational complexity. In this session, Neelakshi Soni shares lessons from building and scaling high throughput distributed systems at Meta and Amazon that process millions of requests per second. The talk covers real world engineering challenges in AI driven infrastructure, including attribution systems, config driven platform architectures, experimentation frameworks, performance optimization, and reliability engineering. Attendees will learn practical approaches for designing scalable backend systems, reducing operational overhead, improving developer velocity, and building production ready AI platforms that operate reliably at massive scale. This session is intended for backend engineers, infrastructure engineers, AI platform teams, and software engineers building production AI systems.

• Neelakshi Soni

Stop Vibe-Testing: Run Real Agent Evals

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:20–10:45 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Most teams ship AI agents the same way: run a few prompts, eyeball the output, decide it "looks good," ship it. That isn't testing, that's vibes. Vibes don't catch regressions, don't survive a prompt change, and don't tell you whether a new model is actually better. Agents are too complicated and unpredictable for vibes-based testing to work. In this talk I walk you through what real agent evaluation looks like: what evals are, why they're necessary, what separates a useful eval from one that just produces noise, and how to use eval results to actually ship better agents. You'll leave with a concrete framework for closing the loop: instrument, trace, evaluate, validate the evaluator, iterate.

• Laurie Voss

Sponsor Activity: Governing Agents When You Can't Trust the Model

Other · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:25–10:35 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Guardrails live inside the model, and a model can be talked out of them. This demo puts enforcement in the runtime instead, a single control plane that every agent tool call passes through. Your identity system and your own policies decide what each user's agent can see and do, and the runtime applies those rules and logs every call it allows or blocks. Watch it hold a wire transfer for human approval, strip customer PII from a response before the model reads it, and shut down a user who borrowed a colleague's connection to reach tools they were never granted.

• Shub Argha

A2A v1 Deep Dive: The Specification, Extensions, and Custom Protocol Bindings

Not classified · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

A2A 1.0 is the first stable specification for agent-to-agent communication — tasks, agent cards, message parts, and a transport model designed for both cloud-native deployments and end devices. But the spec was designed to be extended, and understanding where core semantics end. This session walks through A2A v1 at a technical level: how tasks are structured, what agent cards encode and how they are published for federated discovery via AI Catalog, and how the protocol adapts its transport model across cloud-native deployments and end devices. The second half covers what's open: the extension mechanism that lets the ecosystem add capabilities without forking the spec, and custom protocol bindings that let you replace the default transport while preserving full A2A semantics. We walk through a concrete example — implementing a custom binding, registering an extension in an agent card, and verifying interoperability against the reference implementation. The session closes with a practical framework: when should a new capability be an extension, when a new binding, and when does it belong in the core spec?

• Darrel Miller
• Luca Muscariello

Auth.md - The Open Protocol for Agentic Registration

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

AI agents are becoming users of software — but most apps still only know how to authenticate humans. Auth.md is an open spec for agent-native authentication: a way for AI agents to discover how to register for a service, prove identity, request scopes, receive tokens, and start using an API without breaking out of the agent workflow. This talk introduces our work on Auth.md and the emerging pattern for AI agent auth standards — including agent-native signup, identity assertions, ID-JAG, delegated authorization, and service discovery through an auth.md file. You’ll also see a live demo where an AI agent discovers that Cloudflare supports agent registration, uses an Acme identity to create an account, receives an API token and account ID, sets up the Wrangler CLI, connects to Firecrawl, and deploys a live app. Auth.md is designed to help agents become legitimate users in your system — not fake humans, not spam, and not impersonators — but real agentic users with clear identity and authorization boundaries.

• Michael Grinich

Engineering Multiagent Systems

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

MCP and A2A set the stage for building systems of agents that interact with each other and legacy information systems. Current multiagent systems in industry are limited to problem solving, where the agents are orchestrated to solve a problem for the same stakeholder (person or organization). Orchestration is over-constrained and inapplicable when agents represent different stakeholders. We need protocols such as the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). However, current methods (as used for specifying UCP) are rigid and lack a formal model. Thus, they prevent us from benefiting from the power of modern AI. This session will summarize years of peer-reviewed research on engineering multiagent systems. (1) How to specify interaction protocols to gain high flexibility with correctness guarantees. (2) How to program an agent to participate in a protocol, without being limited to message reactions. (3) How to represent and reason about the social or business meaning of an interaction (for business agreements and safety guardrails). The session will include examples, including a proper reconstruction of UCP, and brief demonstrations. The underlying code is open source.

• Munindar Singh

From DCR to CIMD: MCP Client Identity in Production

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

MCP's authorization spec now points implementers to Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD) as the preferred path when clients and servers have no prior relationship, with Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) as fallback. That shift changes how client identity is created, verified, rotated, cached, and audited. For server authors, gateway operators, and client platform teams running auth across many providers. We unpack the spec change, show how CIMD fits the OAuth handshake, and map the open production problems: redirect URI trust, SSRF hardening, metadata caching, key rotation, revocation, and tenant isolation. DCR creates operational pressure at scale: registration sprawl, stale records, tenant drift, unclear ownership. CIMD replaces much of that with stable HTTPS client identifiers backed by URL-resolved metadata. Grounded in running an MCP gateway, we walk through a migration matrix across DCR, pre-registration, and CIMD; a pattern for translating identity across heterogeneous servers; and an audit model preserving attribution from human to agent to tool to API. Attendees leave with a model of MCP client identity in 2026, a decision tree for registration, and a checklist.

• Alvaro Inckot

Generative UI at Scale with A2UI

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

As AI agents become more sophisticated, static front-end applications are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. When agents can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks, collapsing their outputs into a "wall of text" or standard markdown severely limits the user experience. Enter Generative UI (GenUI): an architecture where Large Language Models orchestrate interfaces in real-time or cached, adapting layouts, components, and data visualizations based on user intent and session context. In this session, we will dive deep into A2UI (Agent-to-User Interface), the open-source toolkit shipped by Google that safely bridges the gap between autonomous AI agents and frontend clients. You will learn how A2UI uses a secure, declarative JSONL stream to send UI structures across trust boundaries without ever transmitting vulnerable executable code. You own your own design system, A2UI let's agents drive whatever front end "catalog of components" you want to share. The client is in charge of this contract and the agent adjusts, natively "speaking" UI and dynamically construct interactive, brand-safe experiences across Web, Flutter, Android, and iOS.

• Alan Blount

Interoperable Agent Discovery: AI Catalog, ARD, and the AGNTCY Directory

Breakout session · Oct 22, 2026 · 10:55–11:20 local time (America/Los_Angeles)

Multi-agent systems today compose across MCP servers, A2A agents, and agent skills — artifacts that live in separate registries with incompatible metadata formats. AI Catalog addresses this at the standard level: a typed JSON format that gives each artifact type a common envelope for identity, capability, and provenance, without replacing the formats each community has standardized. What makes the standard operational is federation. AI Catalog's well-known discovery mechanism lets clients traverse distributed registries without a central index. ARD complements it with a user-facing API — enabling any code assistant (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to discover AgentSkills, MCP servers, and A2A cards across federated catalogs, verify them cryptographically, and resolve them to a live endpoint without knowing the source registry. The AGNTCY directory is the reference implementation — content management, multi-registry discovery, and federation end to end. We demo the full flow: publishing an AgentSkill, an MCP server, and an A2A card under the AI Catalog standard, federating them through ARD, and discovering them securely from a code assistant at runtime.

• Junjie Bu
• Luca Muscariello