Last Christmas, after everyone had gone quiet for the holidays, I sat down with a pen and some paper and started drawing Spike. Not the Spike we actually had, but the Spike I wanted, the one I had been carrying around in my head for a long time without ever really putting it down anywhere. A little while later I brought a few of those screens into Figma and showed them to the team over coffee one afternoon.
The breakthroughs in AI today aren’t just coming from bigger datasets and more compute; Reinforcement Learning (RL) has quietly become one of the most powerful forces in modern AI development. RL is teaching models to reason and self-correct, enabling capabilities that make AGI feel less like science fiction and more like an inevitable future.
AI’s ability to write code made huge strides over the past year. Today, coding agents aren’t just assisting developers; they are winning the "coding race" by orders of magnitude and fundamentally changing the way engineers work.
The way we build, ship, and run software is being reshaped by AI. In this fireside chat, Yanbing Li (CPO, Datadog) and Tom Occhino (CPO, Vercel) will discuss their perspectives on the impact AI is having across the industry and what it means for teams navigating this shift today.
AI coding assistants are rapidly evolving from passive copilots into active, agentic collaborators capable of planning, executing, and iterating on complex software tasks. This shift has huge ramifications onthe software development lifecycle (SDLC), developer productivity, and even the structure of engineering teams.
Managing IT assets smoothly is not an easy task. Organizations depend more on technology to execute their operations these days. Hence, the requirement for effective IT Asset Management (ITAM) has grown considerably. However, beyond merely managing these assets, ensuring compliance with relevant ITAM regulations and standards matters just as much. And, in this race to keep up with changing regulations, you are not alone. Many organizations face the same challenge.
On-call duty is a high-stakes reality in modern IT and digital ops teams. While essential for ensuring system reliability, the chronic stress it creates doesn’t have to be a given. On-call burnout is a serious threat to your team’s well-being and your organization’s performance, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s a systemic problem, not a personal failing.
Modern IT incidents don’t stick to a 9-to-5 schedule. System failures, security breaches, and performance degradations can happen at any time, and today’s distributed teams must respond instantly, wherever they are. The ability to receive, acknowledge, and manage incidents directly from a smartphone is no longer a luxury—it’s a core requirement for effective incident response in 2026.
Upsun is included in IDC ProductScape guide to worldwide cloud deployment-centric platform capabilities. Building and scaling applications has never been more complex or more critical. Engineering teams are under constant pressure to ship faster, manage increasingly complex infrastructure, and adapt to the rapid rise of agent and AI-powered development. Choosing the right platform to support these demands is an important decision for technology organizations.