XConf APAC 2026 | Singapore

Hear insightful talks on designing, building and scaling meaningful solutions with AI.
About this Event

About XConf

XConf is Thoughtworks’ annual tech conference created by technologists, for technologists. With a focus on high-quality topics, XConf offers a unique opportunity to explore bold ideas, challenge yourself with fresh perspectives and connect with like-minded technologists.

More details about each talk and speaker can be found here.

Event details

• Date: Friday, October 2, 2026
• Time: 9:00 am - 5:00 pm (Registration starts at 8:30am)
• Venue: Ballroom 1, Level 3, The Westin Singapore, 12 Marina View, Asia Square Tower 2, Singapore 018961

Who should attend?

Whether you’re a software engineer, developer, architect or a technologist passionate about using technology to create real impact, XConf is for you. This event is perfect for professionals and engineers who are shaping strategies, driving innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology.

Thoughts from past events:

“Wonderful event. Good networking with fellow engineers.”

"Very impactful and friendly conference with good venue."

Get your tickets today!

Disclaimer

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Agenda

🕑: 08:30 AM
Registration
🕑: 09:00 AM
Welcome
🕑: 09:05 AM
Opening Keynote - To be announced
🕑: 09:35 AM
AI is a scout, not an engine
Host: Tyson Brown

Info: I spent 26 months building a distributed database in Rust with heavy AI help. Three times, AI nearly broke it. Code that compiled, passed tests, benchmarked well, but would have corrupted data in production. Each failure looked like success.

The consensus says AI takes the coding while humans move up to design and testing. It's backwards. AI belongs on the disposable edges. Humans belong in the middle, holding the understanding no test can verify from outside.

This talk is those three near-misses, the research behind them, and Human Replay: the method that keeps the understanding yours.

🕑: 10:10 AM
Coffee break
🕑: 10:35 AM
Making chatbots sweat: Testing AI conversations at scale
Host: Bishnu Prasad and Pratyush Mittal

Info: AI chatbots now handle our banking, healthcare, and support but how do we know they're safe? Unlike traditional software, the same question can get a helpful answer one moment and a wrong, unsafe, or manipulated one the next, and a human tester chatting for an hour barely scratches the surface.

This talk introduces AI SimTest: an engine that uses AI to test AI. It generates hundreds of simulated users, including adversarial ones, runs real conversations against any bot, and judges every response for accuracy, safety, and compliance. We'll show how "AI testing AI" catches failures before real people do.

🕑: 11:15 AM
Agents don't fail, they guess: Designing contracts for multi-agent pipelines
Host: Amit Upadhyay

Info: Multi-agent pipelines fail differently from single agents. One agent gets it wrong and you see it. A pipeline compounds wrong assumptions invisibly — each agent confidently consuming the uncertain output of the last.

This is the contract problem: when one agent's output is another's input, how do you encode what it doesn't know?

We built and deployed this in production. Two agents, one analysing, one transforming, passing a typed contract between them. Every field carries a confidence level. A gating mechanism stops the pipeline when certainty falls below threshold.

Agents don't fail — they guess. Build your contracts like that's true.

🕑: 11:55 AM
The AI native squad: How small teams deliver faster with AI
Host: Jessie Xia and Siyuan Li

Info: AI is changing software delivery, but the real breakthrough is not just making individual developers faster. It is redesigning delivery around AI-native squads.

In this talk, Jessie Xia and Siyuan Li will share how small, high-transparency teams of 3–6 people can deliver business outcomes faster by embedding AI across every role — product engineer, quality manager, and domain expertise. Through real delivery examples, they will show how team structure, ceremonies, and daily workflows change when AI becomes a shared team capability.

The talk will also look ahead to harness-driven agentic delivery, where humans guide intent and quality while autonomous agents assist with execution. Mastering the AI-native squad model today is the foundation for the future of software delivery.

🕑: 12:30 PM
Lunch buffet
🕑: 01:30 PM
First Responder: Agentic incident triage
Host: Vijay More

Info: Production incidents are costly, chaotic, and deeply manual. Engineers sift through logs, metrics, configs, and code under pressure, often with no clear starting point. Agentic AI changes that.

In this talk, Vijay presents a live demo of First Responder, an agentic system that investigates production incidents end-to-end. Starting from an alert, automatic triaging and closes the loop with automated fix generation and pull request creation, with engineers staying in control throughout.

🕑: 02:10 PM
From dead-on-arrival to alive: How AI resurrects the humble ADR
Host: Xiaowen Zhuang and Hao Pan

Info: Architecture Decision Records often die the moment they are written: approved, archived, and quickly ignored as teams and systems evolve. In the age of AI, that could change.

In this talk, two solution architects show how ADRs can become living, versioned specifications that guide implementation, shape AI-assisted workflows, and support continuous governance across many teams. We explore how documents become machine-consumable context, how architectural intent can be traced into code and review loops, and how AI can help reduce drift. The deeper shift is socio-technical: designing not just systems, but the environment that keeps them aligned.

🕑: 02:50 PM
Keeping sight of the customer in AI-first delivery
Host: Kate Linton

Info: As AI agents rush into every product roadmap, it’s become dangerously easy to optimise for what AI can do, rather than what people actually need. Many teams are shipping AI-first features that are impressive in demos but fragile in the real world: eroding trust, amplifying bias, or quietly adding cognitive load.

In this talk, I’ll share a practical approach to keeping humans at the centre of AI-first product design. We’ll look at how to frame problems in human terms before choosing models, how to design for consent, control and transparency, and how to use guardrails and hypothesis-led experimentation to balance desirability with safety, accountability and economic impact.

🕑: 03:25 PM
Coffee break
🕑: 03:50 PM
Beyond GPUs: Building the engineering platform for the AI factory
Host: Shangqi Liu

Info: AI factories promise massive compute, but GPUs alone do not create a productive AI platform. The challenge is to make thousands of accelerators, networks, power systems, cooling infrastructure, and facilities operate as one reliable, efficient system.

Drawing on first-hand experience building AI datacenter infrastructure, this talk explores the engineering platform behind the AI factory: Kubernetes, topology-aware orchestration, inference serving, developer workflows, high-resolution telemetry, resilient data pipelines, and power/grid-aware scheduling. We examine the architectural principles and trade-offs required to turn scarce, expensive infrastructure into production AI that is operable, scalable, and trustworthy.

🕑: 04:30 PM
Closing Keynote - To be announced
🕑: 04:55 PM
Closing