Your platform won the argument. Now it has to evolve
2026-06-19
Your platform won the argument. Now it has to evolve
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Your platform won the argument. Now it has to evolve.
I keep having the same conversation. On panels, in Slack, at dinner after talks. And I know already it will be the #1 topic next week at PlatformCon 2026. Platform engineering has basically won. 90% of organizations have adopted it, 76% run a dedicated platform team, and nobody serious is still arguing about whether to build an internal platform.
And yet. The platform that won that argument was built for a different era. Overly, developer focused, human speed, and like last week approaching problems by being faster or better without recognising we’re in a new paradigm.
That gap is exactly what our own Sam Barlien dug into in a new whitepaper on Platform Engineering 2.0: An evolution for the AI era, co-authored with Pankaj Gupta over at Broadcom. It is the clearest map I've seen of how platforms have to stretch for the AI era. They break down how you should be thinking about your IDP. An evolution, not a reset. Your existing platform is the substrate for what comes next, not the casualty of it.
Sam lays the stretch out across five shifts:
AI workloads become first-class citizens. GPUs, model serving, and MCP gateways flowing through the same self-service path as everything else.
Agents arrive as a brand new user. The first non-human persona in over a decade, needing scoped identity, guardrails, and audit logging.
Cost turns into a platform signal. FinOps moves out of the monthly rear-view report and into the moment of provisioning.
Security shifts down into the substrate. Not piled onto developers, baked into the platform so every path is a secure path and AI security gaps addressed.
Architecture gets composable. Repavable, API-first building blocks instead of the tired build-versus-buy standoff.
None of this throws away what you already built. Platform as Product, golden paths, self-service IDPs, they are all a fundamental part of this. The discipline doesn't restart at each phase. It accumulates. So while other fields spend this year asking if they still matter in an agentic world, platform engineers are staring at the single biggest expansion of mandate the discipline has ever seen.
The team that masters infrastructure for the AI era is the team that masters the AI era, and that starts with treating infrastructure as a first-class platform concern rather than the thing under the floorboards
There is no truly better primer before PlatformCon next week. So read this. And be ready to discuss it at the world’s biggest platform engineering conference in just a few days.
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