Swix

6 Things to Know about AIE World's Fair 2026

Jun 21, 2026 · 17:50

Swix, co-founder of AI Engineer, outlines six key features of the 2026 World's Fair in San Francisco. The event is over 4x larger than 2025, with 50% new topics, an expanded expo floor (4 stages, 4x bigger), and a new research-industry poster session that includes printed tweets. A leadership track on Level 3 features the Token Billionaire lounge for heavy LLM users and off-the-record McKinsey sessions. AI verticals debut in agentic commerce, healthcare, finance, and GTM, with a new AI Engineer New York focused on finance. Side events include a World Cup viewing, New Engineer Orientation (NEO) with 300+ signups, and a kids event; attendees can claim $38,000 in sponsor offers.

The New Application Layer - Malte Ubl, CTO Vercel

Apr 20, 2026 · 18:52

Vercel CTO Malte Ubl argues that AI engineering is the legitimate successor to web development and that the real value lies in the application layer, not the model labs. He identifies four effective agent archetypes—24/7 support, compressed research, surfacing existing information, and eliminating boring work—and reveals that over 60% of vercel.com page views now come from AI agents. Ubl predicts model companies will commoditize, driving costs down and empowering engineers, while citing Europe's leadership in AI engineering through Vercel's AI SDK, Pi (a coding agent from Austria), and OpenClaw. He stresses the need for open-mindedness toward paradigm shifts and new infrastructure, such as sandboxed agent runtimes, and warns of impending security challenges.

Machines of Buying and Selling Grace - Adam Behrens, New Generation

Jul 23, 2025 · 19:37

Adam Behrens, CEO of New Gen, argues that AI will transform commerce from static websites to agentic interactions where buyer and seller agents negotiate via intent infrastructure. He traces the evolution from clerk-assisted stores to e-commerce, now to AI-natives where ChatGPT and Claude act as shopping interfaces. Behrens details three challenges: payment delegation (solved via Viza's delegated authentication), product discovery (a unified API akin to Plaid for merchants), and preference representation (two-sided, dynamic, with market-design solutions). He cites Samsung's adoption of an MCP server for chat clients and notes that AI-sourced users convert at higher rates. Behrens predicts revenue sharing via affiliate models and that agents may bypass credit cards for stablecoins, while merchants retain control by embedding transportable data into model providers' surfaces.