Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly peek behind the platform engineering curtain. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons, and updates from the platform engineering community. This is a guest newsletter by my friend Ajay Chankramath who leads at Platform Engineering Consulting, the advisory and consulting wing of the Platform Engineering community!

But first… I WROTE A BOOK!

At its core the book is about one idea. Platform engineering is becoming the operating model for knowledge work in the AI era. The book is a conceptual model and a practical playbook for redesigning how organizations work in the AI era, across software, marketing, finance, legal, any kind of knowledge work.

Preorder your copy now!

The ADP is coming. Your IDP better be ready

PlatformCon 2026 just wrapped last week virtually as well as in London and New York. One word dominated the agenda - agentic!

Gregor Hohpe talked about platforms defying the laws of IT physics in London. Patrick Debois called context the new code. Kief Morris challenged us to put humans on the loop, not in it.  By all accounts, Bruno Passos and Mansi Mittal’s session on their GenAI platform journey at Booking.com was a standout.

In New York, Kelsey Hightower made listeners take a step back from the AI euphoria in his talk on Zero Token Architecture. Jay Moran from Fiserv showed what golden path scaling actually looks like at enterprise scale.

Kaspar and Luca introduced the idea of Agentic Development Platforms (ADPs) in their keynote both days. I took both main stages to talk about architecting Agentic Development Platforms, with Mallory joining me in New York. Think of ADP as an extension of an IDP, but the paths serve agents too in addition to humans (not instead of), so that it can run without direct human intervention when needed. I care about this because every week we talk to organizations being pushed to support agentic workflows without a solid IDP foundation underneath. 

PlatformCon was not all about AI. 55% of our talks focused exclusively on building the IDP/foundations right and only about 45% had AI focus. Still significant change in direction, but the focus continued to be IDP. For good reason.

I talked to hundreds (over 300+!) of you across the week through our executive breakfast gatherings, therapy sessions, and the platform clinic as well as my book signings. Teams hear “ADP” and immediately jump to agents, LLMs, orchestration layers. They picture autonomous systems dispatching work, validating changes, remediating incidents without humans in the loop. The destination is absolutely right, but you can’t build an Agentic Developer Platform on a broken Internal Developer Platform.

An IDP standardizes paths for humans. An ADP makes those same paths executable by agents. If the human paths are inconsistent, undocumented, or held together by tribal knowledge, agents won’t fix that. They’ll amplify the mess. This is where the “paths” matter. They’re the connective tissue between your IDP today and your ADP tomorrow. 

Most enterprises I talk to are in their early stages of building the platforms to support AI workloads. Closing that gap is the work that matters right now, and it starts with rearchitecting your IDP into an ADP.

We also ran Platform Clinic for the Age of AI sessions at both live days in addition to 1:1 advisory conversations with engineering leaders. Platform Clinic was where several of you came together to talk about the key challenges that your teams are encountering, but instead of one speaker telling you what their perspective is, this was an opportunity to work in a small group to come up with solutions yourself. We had about 5 prompts we discussed around platform value, need to build the foundations right, agentic identity, golden paths and when to choose an agent.  If you missed them and want a similar read of where your platform stands, that’s exactly what we do at Platform Engineering Consulting, and I’d love to talk with you about it.

AI workloads require platform engineering. But only if the platform is actually ready. To quote Kaspar and Luca from their new book, Thinking in Platforms, “AI expands what is possible, but platforms define what is usable”.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• How can a Context Lake cut down up to 80% of your token usage?

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.