Keynote: Agents as First-Class Users in Production - Mathias Biilmann, Co-Founder and CEO, Netlify

In this talk, Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, discusses the evolution of web deployment and developer tools through the lens of agent experience. He explains how Netlify has become an integral part of the cloud-native ecosystem, leveraging Kubernetes since 2017 to enhance deployment efficiency. Biilmann introduces the concept of agent experience, or AX, emphasizing the shift from traditional developer experiences to systems that cater to AI agents assisting in software development. He notes how this shift broadens the user base from millions of developers to a potential audience of billions. Biilmann encourages infrastructure teams to rethink user interfaces and documentation to better serve agent-driven workflows, and highlights ongoing efforts at Netlify to create solutions tailored for these new coding environments.

Hey everyone, I'm Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify. We're a front-end web deployment cloud platform helping more than 12 million developers create around 3 million sites every every month. We launched a more than decade ago today with this idea of being the fastest path from code to a URL and with this idea of building the best experience for developers building on the web. We've been early

adopters of the whole cloud-native ecosystem using Kubernetes since 2017. And in reverse, the Cloud Native Foundation and the Linux Foundation were really early adopters of Netlify amongst the open source projects. We have more than 300 projects using Netlify, deploying more than 500 times a day, and we are serving around a billion requests a month for for all these But as we look at the next decade of

Netlify, we're seeing this shift from developer experience to agent experience as all of us that are building infrastructure and developer tools are suddenly not just building for developers for but for developers using agents to to to write their code from consumer tools to lovable to code editors like Cloud Code or or or our own agent runners. Back in in January last year, I wrote this article introducing

the concept of AX or agent experience as the holistic experience that AI agents will have when they're the user of your product or or your platform and in agents are changing the whole way software is built right now. At the core, they're they're simple loops or LLM calls and and tools. And suddenly our infrastructure tools and our products are these tools that agents are using and the

context they get is what we get into them through our documentation sites and our skills and and and the stuff we publish is on the And it's changed the whole developer tool landscape for us. Our sort of user base has gone from 17 million JavaScript developers to about 3 billion people that can use spreadsheets. And that's happening to almost every infrastructure team as everybody is starting to

to to to build software. But we're still building a lot of our experiences for for humans. This is the Netlify hosted kubernetes.io and the getting started page, right? Like but if we think about the starting point for kubernetes is this really how users get started today or does it look more like this? And if it looks more like this what should we do to to to address

that from a question of like what what we build on the web and and and for our customers? At Netlify we put a lot of work and thought into building the right agent for developers using coding agents. Um we're working on concepts like Netlify specifically for agents. And if we think about all the infrastructure products in in in this room how should they look like? If you're

thinking through that and and and want to help building for agents then hit me up on social media or here here at the conference. We're happy to to help. Thank you.