MCP Dev Summit Seoul 2026: Full Schedule

09:30 KST

Keynote: Welcome & Opening Remarks - Demetrios Brinkmann, Member Non-Technical Staff, Agentic AI Foundation

Thursday August 13, 2026 09:30 - 09:40 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Speakers

Demetrios Brinkmann

Member Non-Technical Staff, Agentic AI Foundaiton

Thursday August 13, 2026 09:30 - 09:40 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

09:45 KST

Keynote: Two Years of MCP: State of The Ecosystem - Den Delimarsky, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic

Thursday August 13, 2026 09:45 - 10:00 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Two years ago, getting an AI agent to reach anything outside itself meant writing a whole bunch of glue code. A custom integration for every tool, every data source, every model you wanted to support. Nobody enjoyed this, and yet everybody did it anyway.

MCP was the emerging alternative - one protocol, implemented once on each side. It empowered all imaginable agents to be able to talk to anything through a standard set of conventions.

Two years later, the ecosystem around MCP is bigger than the spec itself. There are servers for nearly everything anyone would want to wire an agent into, clients across every major platform, and entire categories of capabilities that make the protocol suitable for more than just ferrying text-based data back and forth.

MCP is now the undeniable substrate most agentic workflows run on. Getting there took a couple of years, a large number of engineering debates, and the work of a community of maintainers, developers, and advocates that spans the globe. This is the story of us getting here.

Speakers

Den Delimarsky

Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic

Den Delimarsky is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he helps build the Model Context Protocol (MCP). He's spent over a decade at the intersection of product management and engineering, building developer tools and platforms. He writes at .

Thursday August 13, 2026 09:45 - 10:00 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

10:00 KST

Keynote: To Be Announced

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:00 - 10:10 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:00 - 10:10 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

10:10 KST

Keynote: A Cloud Service Provider's MCP Operations Story (From MCP Generator to MCP Gateway) - Jihye Kim, Backend Engineer, Naver Cloud Platform

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:10 - 10:25 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

To attach an MCP server to each of hundreds of Naver Cloud Platform services, every service team had to implement MCP from scratch.
We built an MCP Generator to solve this — automatically generating MCP server code from OpenAPI specs.

Then Claude's MCP Builder Skills arrived. Suddenly, anyone could build an MCP server through a few conversations with Claude. The value of the generator we had built disappeared overnight.

We had to change direction.
And the question changed with it — from "how do we make building MCP servers easier?" to "how do we operate hundreds of them?"

That's how MCP Gateway was born. It aggregates multiple MCP servers behind a single HTTP endpoint, so users can connect every cloud service tool to their AI agent with just one URL and one API key.

This talk is structured in two parts:

Part 1 — The Journey: The process of figuring out how to provide good MCP servers for hundreds of cloud services — what problems we found, what we tried, and how the arrival of MCP Builder Skills became the turning point.

Part 2 — MCP Gateway: An introduction and demo of what problems it solves today, and a look at what we're building next.

Speakers

Jihye Kim

Backend Engineer, Naver Cloud Platform

Backend developer at Naver Cloud Platform

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:10 - 10:25 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

10:55 KST

Zero-Trust MCP: Treating Every Tool Call as an Untrusted API Request From the Outside World - Akshat Khanna & Unnati Mishra, Independent

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:55 - 11:20 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Most MCP deployments implicitly trust the LLM. If the model says call this tool with these parameters, the server calls it. That trust model is wrong — and at enterprise scale, it is catastrophic. This talk reframes MCP server design through a zero-trust lens: every tool invocation is treated as an untrusted external request that must be authenticated, authorized, validated, rate-limited, and audited independently of who initiated it. I'll demonstrate a zero-trust MCP middleware layer that enforces four controls: (1) per-call JWT audience binding so a tool call valid in one agent context is rejected in another, (2) schema-level input validation with content-addressable allow-lists to prevent prompt injection via tool parameters, (3) capability scoping — tools declare what filesystem paths, network ranges, and data stores they may access, enforced by a policy engine at runtime, and (4) immutable audit logs using append-only signed ledger entries. Live demos include intercepting and blocking a prompt injection attack mid-flight. Code ships as open-source middleware compatible with any MCP SDK.

Speakers

Unnati Mishra

Software Engineer 2, Independent

Unnati is working as a R&D Engineer Software 2 at VMware by Broadcom, India. Currently working with the Release Engg team of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. She has been active in Open Source community since 2019 and has also participated in many Hackathons, bagging prizes in few of them... Read More →

Akshat Khanna

Machine Learning Engineer II, Independent

Akshat Khanna is a Machine Learning Engineer II at Angel One, where he builds GenAI-powered bots and leverages agentic AI for high-performance trading platforms. Previously, he worked as MTS II at VMware Tanzu, focusing on Kubernetes solutions for the edge. He is an active open-source... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 10:55 - 11:20 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

11:25 KST

MCP in Prod: An SRE & DevOps Guide to Not Getting Paged at 3 AM - Deep Poharkar, Obmondo

Thursday August 13, 2026 11:25 - 11:50 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

We started running MCP servers in production about a year ago. Within weeks we got our first 3 AM page, a tool was silently failing, agents were retrying into the void, and we had zero visibility into what was going wrong. No dashboard caught it. No runbook existed. That incident kicked off a twelve-month journey of figuring out how to actually operate these things. We ended up cutting agent-related incidents by about 70% and got tool invocation P99 under 500ms.

This talk is the playbook we wish we had on day one. We'll cover the stuff that bit us: health checks that go beyond HTTP 200 and actually validate MCP protocol readiness, how to handle deployments when connections are stateful, what to put on your observability dashboards (and what turned out to be noise), and circuit breaker patterns for when an upstream tool starts misbehaving. We'll also do a quick demo of a monitoring setup we've been running.

Speakers

Deep Poharkar

Site Reliability Engineer, Obmondo

I’m Deep, a Site Reliability Engineer at Obmondo working on production reliability and incident response. I’ve contributed to open source through GSoC and CNCF’s LFX Mentorship, including work on LitmusChaos, and have spoken at Open Source Summit Japan 2024.

Thursday August 13, 2026 11:25 - 11:50 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

11:55 KST

Secure MCP Servers in Production: A Practical Guide for Developers - Valeri Milke, VamiSec GmbH

Thursday August 13, 2026 11:55 - 12:20 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a core interface layer for AI agents, yet many teams still secure MCP servers as if they were ordinary APIs. This session provides a practical guide for building and operating secure MCP servers in production.

I will translate key security principles into concrete engineering decisions: secure local vs. remote MCP architectures, trusted tool onboarding, signed manifests, schema-based input and output validation, prompt injection controls, OAuth 2.1 / OIDC-based authentication, centralized policy enforcement, hardened deployment, audit logging, and continuous validation.

The goal is not theory, but an actionable security baseline that developers, architects, and platform teams can apply immediately. Attendees will leave with a pragmatic minimum bar and review checklist for MCP server development that helps reduce avoidable security failures, improve trust between clients and servers, and strengthen the security posture of the growing MCP ecosystem.

Speakers

Valeri Milke

CEO, VamiSec GmbH

Valeri Milke is CEO of VamiSec GmbH and an AI security and compliance expert focused on secure development, threat modeling, and the practical implementation of trustworthy AI systems. His work spans LLM security, agentic AI, software and product security, and regulatory frameworks... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 11:55 - 12:20 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

13:50 KST

Demystifying MCP Auth in Plain English - Rohit Ganguly, Descope

Thursday August 13, 2026 13:50 - 14:15 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

For most developers, one of the trickiest parts of building MCP Servers is Auth. With an ever-evolving specification that takes advantage of niche OAuth standards, many feel left behind and simply don't bother to secure their MCP Servers, leading to severe risks for organizations and users adopting MCP.

This session will cover the MCP Auth spec from first principles, explaining concepts in a way that even auth newbies can understand. The goal of this session is to help developers 'catch up' on the latest with MCP auth and secure their MCP servers.

Participants can walk away from this session with a cursory understanding of the state of the MCP auth spec and how to roll out auth in their MCP servers.

Speakers

Rohit Ganguly

AI Product Manager, Descope

Rohit is an AI Product Manager at Descope, where he leads the MCP Auth and Agentic Identity efforts. Previously, he worked in Microsoft's Developer Division across products like the Azure SDKs and VS Code before launching the Azure MCP Server.

Thursday August 13, 2026 13:50 - 14:15 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

14:20 KST

Authorization in MCP Systems: Getting It Right From the Start - Aram Andreasyan, Cerbos

Thursday August 13, 2026 14:20 - 14:45 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

When teams start building on MCP, one of the first real questions that comes up is simple: what are agents actually allowed to do?

In smaller setups, it's easy to bake access checks into the agent or the application itself. That works until it doesn't. Once you're dealing with multiple tools, services, and data sources, things get messy fast. Permission logic gets copied across services, drifts out of sync, and when something breaks, nobody can agree on where the problem actually lives.

This talk covers how I approach authorization in MCP-based systems. Where access decisions should live, how to keep them consistent as complexity grows, and what changes when agents are acting on behalf of users rather than just on their own.

The focus is on patterns that have worked in real systems: centralizing your policy layer, passing the right context through each request, and keeping decisions auditable so you can trace what happened and why.

You'll leave with a clearer way to think about authorization in MCP environments, and a better sense of where things tend to break down as systems scale.

Speakers

Aram Andreasyan

Director of Solutions, Cerbos

Aram works at Cerbos helping engineering and security teams tackle authorization complexity through policy-as-code. He has a background in cybersecurity, cloud security, and IAM, and spent years consulting for startups and enterprises across EMEA and North America before joining Cerbos... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 14:20 - 14:45 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

14:50 KST

Who Authorized That Agent? Identity and Policy Enforcement for MCP Tool Calls - Kaiwalya Koparkar, Gravitee

Thursday August 13, 2026 14:50 - 15:15 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

When a human calls an API, identity is well understood, OAuth tokens, JWTs, API keys. When an AI agent calls that same API via MCP, the identity model breaks down. Who is the caller? What should it be allowed to do? How do you revoke access when something goes wrong? As MCP adoption moves from dev laptops into production systems, the absence of a consistent identity and authorization layer for agent-initiated traffic is becoming a critical gap. This session walks through the auth problem from first principles covering OAuth flows for non-human callers, per-agent rate limiting, JWT validation at the MCP proxy layer, and policy enforcement patterns that don't require rewriting your backend services. Attendees will leave with a concrete mental model and implementation patterns for securing MCP tool calls in production.

Speakers

Kaiwalya Koparkar

Platform Advocate, Gravitee

Kaiwalya Koparkar is a Platform Advocate at Gravitee and CNCF Ambassador with CKA and CKAD certifications. He specialises in API Management, cloud-native infrastructure, and SRE, and is the founder of Cloud Native Nashik.

Thursday August 13, 2026 14:50 - 15:15 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Security + Identity + Trust

15:45 KST

Why Enterprise MCP Runs on Java - Kevin Dubois, IBM & Mauricio "Salaboy" Salatino, Dash0

Thursday August 13, 2026 15:45 - 16:10 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Most MCP examples are written in Python or TypeScript. Great for prototypes, but enterprises don't ship prototypes. They ship type-safe, robust, observable, secure services. Exactly what Java excels at.

And, perhaps contrary to popular belief, building MCP servers or clients with Java is not hard at all. It is as natural as creating REST servers and clients. Swap a few dependencies, annotate your methods, and your services speak MCP.

But MCP in Java isn't just about exposing data to LLMs. It can also vastly augment your AI development experience. We'll show how we built an MCP-based agent into the Quarkus framework that exposes live runtime intelligence to your code assistant: structured exceptions, dynamically discovered tools, extension-specific coding patterns, and version-aware documentation search. With this, your agent doesn't just write code; it can also get real-time feedback from the running application, recover from crashes, and learn patterns specific to the frameworks in your project.

Through real-world examples including IoT integrations and Kubernetes analysis agents, we'll show why Java is the natural home for enterprise MCP adoption.

Speakers

Mauricio Salatino

Ecosystem Engineer, Dash0

Mauricio Salatino, also known as salaboy, works for Dash0 as an Open Source and Ecosystem Engineer. He is a Java Champion, Cloud Native Ambassador, and international Keynote speaker. Before working at Dash0, Mauricio spent the last 10 years building tools for Cloud-Native developers... Read More →

Kevin Dubois

Sr Principal Developer Advocate, IBM

Kevin Dubois is often featured as a (keynote) speaker at conferences around the world, where he shares his passion and knowledge about developer experience, open source, AI, cloud native development and Java. He is also an author, java Champion, and an accomplished software architect... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 15:45 - 16:10 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Enterprise Adoption + Integration

16:15 KST

From APIs To Agentic Toolkits: Designing MCP Flavors and a Public MCP Gateway at Scale - Faizan Akhtar, React India

Thursday August 13, 2026 16:15 - 16:40 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

As teams adopt MCP, a common anti-pattern appears: expose an entire API surface as tools and hope the agent figures it out. In practice this leads to confusion, brittle behavior, and security headaches.

In this talk, I’ll walk through a practical architecture for taming that complexity using MCP flavors and a Public MCP gateway. We’ll start from the real constraints: large APIs, multiple products, and agents that need a bit of more focus & from there:

- design flavors as curated tool bundles on top of existing OpenAPI contracts;
- expose them via a gateway (/mcp vs /{flavorId}/mcp) while handling auth and routing cleanly;
- and plug these flavors into agents in editors or chat environments.

I’ll also cover how to evaluate and debug flavors using datasets and traces so they’re treated like product surfaces with their own quality bar, not opaque black boxes. Finally, I’ll share lessons learned ramping from a mostly frontend/“traditional” engineering background into MCP and agentic infrastructure work: what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently.

Speakers

Faizan Akhtar

Organiser, React India

Avid Learner | Always a student | Community Enthusiast | Mixed Reality Evangelist

A software engineer trying to grasp technical and interpersonal skills as much as possible. I've organized and spoken at numerous tech conferences and meetups, giving me a strong background in both technical and interpersonal skills. This experience has taught me how to effective... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 16:15 - 16:40 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Ecosystems + Registries + Platform Infrastructure

16:45 KST

From CRDs to Conversations: Simplifying Chaos Engineering With MCP - Pritesh Kiri, Harness

Thursday August 13, 2026 16:45 - 17:10 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Imagine telling your system, “Simulate a pod failure on the payments service,” or asking, “What chaos experiments have we run on service X in the last 30 days?” This talk covers a practical approach to using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with LitmusChaos. The goal is to move away from manual YAML configuration and CRD lookups by using a natural language interface. I'll demonstrate how this MCP setup works and how it changes the workflow for designing and running resilience tests.

This session introduces Chaos Engineering and explores how MCP makes it more accessible. By replacing YAML and dashboards with human language, we’re lowering the barrier to entry for chaos engineering. Resilience testing becomes accessible to QA, product, and on-call teams, not just platform experts. Whether or not you’re currently using Litmus, this talk will provide a roadmap for building your own chaos copilot and a glimpse into a future where resilience is everyone’s responsibility.

Speakers

Pritesh Kiri

Pritesh Kiri, Harness

Pritesh is the DevRel Engineer at Harness and community manager and maintainer of the LitmusChaos Community. He is also the Head of Community at ReactPlay, leading the ReactPlay Bangalore chapter. He has a strong background as a Developer Advocate, leading tech communities and fostering... Read More →

Thursday August 13, 2026 16:45 - 17:10 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

09:30 KST

Keynote: Welcome Back - Demetrios Brinkmann, Member Non-Technical Staff, Agentic AI Foundation

Friday August 14, 2026 09:30 - 09:40 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Speakers

Demetrios Brinkmann

Member Non-Technical Staff, Agentic AI Foundaiton

Friday August 14, 2026 09:30 - 09:40 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

09:40 KST

Keynote: MCP Is the Easy Part - Baruch Sadogursky, Member of DevRel Staff, Tessl AI

Friday August 14, 2026 09:40 - 09:55 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

I plugged 17 MCP servers into my agent, and the agent got worse: slower decisions, dumber questions, somehow forgetting how to use the same tool it had used five minutes earlier.

That's not an MCP problem, the protocol works. The problem is that MCP defines how a tool is invoked and exactly nothing else. Every invocation is a fresh ceremony of re-discover, re-parse, re-decide, re-handle, with no persistent artifact wrapping any of it. The agent has no memory of what worked, no feedback signal for what didn't, no surrounding context to anchor which tool, when, and why.

Stateless function calls in an inherently stateful problem.

This talk is about the layer above MCP, the one that turns a directory of well-formed tool calls into coherent agent behavior, call it a Skill, a context artifact, or whatever your stack calls it. I'll show what changes when you bolt one on top of MCP: tool-call frequency drops, accuracy climbs, dumb questions to the user disappear.

If your MCP integration demos beautifully but production doesn't, this is the talk for you.

(And if you haven't shipped an MCP server yet, congrats. You'll skip a few mistakes. The protocol is the easy part.)

Speakers

Baruch Sadogursky

Member of DevRel Staff, Tessl AI

Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He built DevRel at JFrog, co-authored "Liquid Software" and "DevOps Tools for Java Developers," and is a Java Champion, Microsoft MVP, and CNCF Ambassador... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 09:40 - 09:55 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

10:00 KST

Keynote: To Be Announced

Friday August 14, 2026 10:00 - 10:15 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Friday August 14, 2026 10:00 - 10:15 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

10:15 KST

Keynote: After the Tool Call: What MCP Leaves Open and How to Close It - Viren Baraiya, CTO, Orkes and Co-Creator of Netflix Conductor

Friday August 14, 2026 10:15 - 10:30 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Every team building production agents is solving the same execution problems independently: what happens when a tool call runs for an hour, when the process crashes mid-sequence, when a downstream failure requires earlier steps to be undone. MCP doesn't specify this — deliberately. But the absence of shared patterns is costing the ecosystem duplicated effort and incompatible implementations.

This talk contributes a named, reusable pattern — MCP tool sequences as durable sagas with compensation semantics — and puts three concrete candidates on the table for spec extension: async tool results, execution receipts, and cancellation propagation semantics. A worked implementation serves as existence proof that all three are tractable today, not theoretical.

It also reframes how MCP fits into agent architecture: as the intent layer within a larger execution model, not the execution model itself. That distinction makes MCP more composable and keeps the spec lean as the ecosystem scales.

Speakers

Viren Baraiya

CTO, Co-Creator of Netflix Conductor, Orkes

Viren Baraiya is co-founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, the open-source distributed workflow orchestration engine he built at Netflix.

He is currently building Agentspan, an open-source durable agent runtime for long-running AI agents built on top of Conductor. Previously he held engineering leadership roles at Google and Goldman Sachs

... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 10:15 - 10:30 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Keynote Sessions

11:00 KST

From API To Agent: Building a Video Intelligence MCP Server and Plugin Ecosystem - James Le, TwelveLabs

Friday August 14, 2026 11:00 - 11:25 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Video intelligence is an unusual MCP workload. Operations are asynchronous and long-running (indexing a 30-minute video takes minutes, not milliseconds), inputs span local files and remote URLs, and the tool surface is wide; search, analysis, embeddings, and entity recognition each carry distinct parameter shapes and response patterns.

When we set out to build a production MCP server for TwelveLabs' video understanding platform, these constraints became a useful stress test for the protocol itself. This talk traces the builder's journey from first commit to published npm package (twelvelabs-mcp), covering the decisions that shaped a 19-tool MCP server and the patterns that emerged along the way.

Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for building MCP servers around API-first platforms (particularly those with async workflows, multimodal inputs, and wide tool surfaces), along with a clear picture of how MCP servers can evolve into full agent plugins.

Speakers

James Le

Head of Developer Experience, TwelveLabs

James Le is currently leading Developer Experience at Twelve Labs, a startup building foundation models for video understanding.

Previously, he worked at MLOps startups Superb AI and Snorkel AI and taught production ML content with Full Stack Deep Learning.

He is also the host of Datacast, a podcast following the narrative journey of founders, operators, and investors in the data and AI infrastructure space to unpack the careers that they have built... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 11:00 - 11:25 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

11:30 KST

From AGENTS.md to MCP: Practical Patterns for Agentic Engineering Adoption - Junho Kong, SK Ono

Friday August 14, 2026 11:30 - 11:55 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Developers are moving from ad-hoc AI coding assistance to more reliable agentic engineering workflows. But adoption often stalls when agents lack project-specific instructions, safe tool boundaries, and reviewable outputs.

In this session, I’ll share practical patterns from working with the Codex developer community on how teams can move from one-off AI usage toward repeatable engineering workflows. We’ll walk through an adoption ladder: starting with clear task contracts, encoding team conventions in AGENTS.md, exposing external context through MCP-style tools, and closing the loop with tests, human review, approvals, and reusable workflows.

This talk is not a general introduction to MCP. Instead, it focuses on how developers and teams can combine AGENTS.md, scoped tools, review loops, and MCP to make agentic systems more trustworthy and practical in real-world engineering environments.

Speakers

Junho Kong

AI Platform Architect, SK On

Junho is an at SK On and a Codex Ambassador
working at the intersection of agentic engineering, AI platforms, developer tools, and community education. He leads and supports developer community initiatives around Codex and AI-assisted software development, helping developers move from ad-hoc AI usage toward more structured... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 11:30 - 11:55 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Agent Architecture + Orchestration

12:00 KST

Skills and MCP: Complementary, Not Competing - Dale Seo, Apollo GraphQL

Friday August 14, 2026 12:00 - 12:25 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

MCP has solved a critical problem: giving AI agents access to external tools and data. But access alone isn't enough. An agent with a database tool can still write terrible queries. An agent with a deployment tool can still push unsafe changes. The gap isn't access. It's expertise. Agent Skills are a lightweight format for encoding the domain knowledge agents need to use tools well. A common misconception is that Skills replace MCP. They don't. MCP provides capabilities: live connections to real systems. Skills provide knowledge: patterns to follow, mistakes to avoid, conventions a team considers non-negotiable. Skills ensure an agent does things right. MCP ensures it does real things. You need both. In this talk, I'll show how they work together through real examples. You'll see agents that call tools with the right arguments, handle edge cases, and recover from errors like an experienced developer would. As the creator of Apollo MCP Server and Apollo Skills, I've built on both sides of this equation and will share the challenges of shipping both: distributing them together, keeping them in sync, and evaluating if they still add value as models get smarter.

Speakers

Dale Seo

Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Helping developers help the world 🧑‍🚀🚀

Friday August 14, 2026 12:00 - 12:25 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

MCP Protocol in Depth

12:30 KST

Why We Made Our AI Agent Platform a Codebase Before Adding MCP - Navtej Reddy, Observe.ai

Friday August 14, 2026 12:30 - 12:55 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Six months ago, building a voice AI agent on our platform meant clicking through a UI. This meant editing prompts, dragging conversation flows, hooking up tools with no audit, no rollback, no review. To make the platform work better with MCP, we moved everything to a Git-backed harness. Each agent is now its own repo with skill folders and an agent.md capturing the agent's custom instructions and unique nuances, so when a customer points Cursor or Claude at it via MCP, the AI picks up that context before making any changes.

This talk covers:
(1) the org-change journey from clickops to version control
(2) the sandboxing model, how MCP safely exposes Git's branch model (dual read/write endpoints, tool-layer branch protection, SSO-derived org scoping)
(3) the two-stage CI on every PR, MCP-driven changes ride the same rails as human-authored ones, with simulations followed by automated evaluations
(4) the closed-loop flow that ties it all together, a user files an issue with a test scenario on an agent's page, the sandboxed AI makes the change, validates it, and submits a PR for review using MCP.

Speakers

Navtej Reddy

Software Engineer 2, Observe.ai

Navtej Reddy is a software engineer at Observe AI, where he built the flow-based voice agent framework that powers 10,000+ daily customer calls and led the MCP integration described in this talk. He's also a Springer (2025) author on AI-driven incident debugging. CS graduate of PES... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 12:30 - 12:55 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

14:25 KST

Self-Improving MCP Agents - Kemal Elmizan, GoTo Company

Friday August 14, 2026 14:25 - 14:50 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Most MCP systems today are static at runtime. We define tools, expose schemas and rely on prompts to guide behavior, then hope the system remains reliable after deployment.

In practice, MCP-based systems drift. Agents repeatedly misuse tools, call inefficient sequences or fail in predictable ways. Tool descriptions become outdated. Context grows noisy. Human operators step in to correct outcomes, but those corrections are rarely captured or reused. MCP standardizes how agents connect to tools, but it does not define how systems improve over time.

I would like to explore how to build MCP systems that go beyond execution by introducing feedback loops on top of the protocol. By combining tool call history and observability, we can build systems that identify their own weaknesses and suggest improvements safely.

The session will cover practical patterns:
- Detecting repeated tool misuse and failure patterns
- Learning from retries, fallbacks, and human corrections
- Identifying redundant or low-value tool chains
- Designing safe feedback loops with audit logs, versioning, rollback and human approval

Speakers

Kemal Elmizan

Lead Software Engineer, GoTo Company

Hi there! I am Kemal Elmizan, currently working as a Software Engineer at Gojek (GoTo Company). I like building software across the stack and like to understand what's going on beneath the surface. I have extensive experience in backend, web, and android development. I have lectured... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 14:25 - 14:50 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

14:55 KST

Managing Token Usage in MCP Servers Using Code Mode - Bhumika Satpathy, Google

Friday August 14, 2026 14:55 - 15:20 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

As the ecosystem for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) expands, developers are hitting a familiar wall: token bloat. While MCP provides a powerful standardized interface for LLMs to interact with external data, the "context tax" of verbose tool definitions and massive data payloads can quickly degrade performance and spike costs. To build production-ready agents, we must move beyond basic implementations and embrace advanced orchestration.

This session dives into the architecture of efficient MCP server design, focusing on the "Code Mode" technique. We will explore how to shift the heavy lifting from the LLM’s reasoning space to the server’s execution environment. Instead of forcing the model to process raw, unrefined data, "Code Mode" empowers the LLM to generate and ship logic—miniature, execution-ready scripts—directly to the MCP server. This approach minimizes round-trip latency and drastically reduces the input tokens required for complex data manipulation.

Speakers

Bhumika Satpathy

Senior Software Engineer, Google

I am a Senior Software Engineer at Google and have been working with the MCP Platform team which helps to ease out creation and deployment of MCP Servers for developers within Google. We have solved multitude of challenges that users have faced and explored multiple techniques in... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 14:55 - 15:20 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

15:25 KST

From Legacy To Agentic AI - Seoyul Yoon, SK AX

Friday August 14, 2026 15:25 - 15:50 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

What does it take to bring a company's legacy systems into the AI era?

Hand-coding tool functions for every backend is not sustainable; maintenance costs grow exponentially as the number of services increases. We solved this with a combination of open source projects.

Given a single OpenAPI spec, the system automatically converts endpoints into MCP Tools, a Kubernetes Operator provisions and manages the MCP server, and a LangGraph + deepagents-based Agent talks to internal systems on top, with Agent Skills (SKILL) shaping how that agent behaves.

This session shares how we selected and composed five open source projects, along with the real-world challenges we hit along the way: multi-provider OAuth, custom Keycloak token verification, per-backend header injection, transport-naming inconsistencies across MCP clients, and rewriting auto-generated tool descriptions to fit the LLM.

Not a finished solution, but a practitioner's account showing that turning legacy systems into AI-ready interfaces is entirely achievable with open source.

Speakers

Seoyul Yoon

Manager, SK AX

I am a Platform Engineer on the EnableX Platform team at SK AX, focusing on bridging the gap between legacy enterprise systems and the Agentic AI era. As a passionate advocate for the open-source ecosystem and an active member of Cloud Native Community Korea, I explore the intersection... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 15:25 - 15:50 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

16:05 KST

My Computer's Purchasing? Enabling Agentic Commerce With MCP - Rohit Ganguly, Descope

Friday August 14, 2026 16:05 - 16:30 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Agentic Commerce is one of the most intriguing use cases for agents, with $3-5 Trillion in volume predicted by 2030 according to the latest research. However, with so many protocols, projects, and mechanisms, it's very easy to confused while learning about this use case, and where, if at all, MCP fits into it.

Fortunately for us, MCP fits perfectly into the modern Agentic Commerce Protocols! In this session, we'll cover exactly how and where MCP fits into the agentic commerce equation. On top of that, we'll introduce the concept of Agentic Commerce, break down the popular protocols, and construct a system design of what Agentic Commerce looks like with MCP.

By the end of the session, attendees will have a cursory understanding of Agentic Commerce principles and how to enable this use case with MCP. Additionally, a GitHub repository detailing Agentic Commerce via MCP will be provided.

Speakers

Rohit Ganguly

AI Product Manager, Descope

Friday August 14, 2026 16:05 - 16:30 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

16:35 KST

Dead Reckoning for AI Agents: Building Fault-Tolerant MCP State Machines Without a Map - Akshat Khanna, Independent

Friday August 14, 2026 16:35 - 17:00 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

In maritime navigation, dead reckoning means computing your current position using a known starting point, heading, and speed without GPS. Agentic MCP systems face the exact same problem: once a multi-tool workflow begins, mid-flight failures, partial writes, and out-of-order responses leave your agent adrift with no canonical ground truth. This talk introduces a practical framework for designing fault-tolerant MCP state machines inspired by dead reckoning principles. You will learn how to model agentic workflows as explicit state graphs, how to attach idempotency keys to MCP tool calls to safely replay without side effects, how to design checkpointing patterns that survive process crashes, and how compensating transactions replace naive rollback for real-world tools. Live-coded demos run through a concrete multi-server order pipeline that survives server timeouts, stale tool responses, and partial network partitions. Leave with implementation patterns, failure taxonomy, and open-source primitives you can wire into any MCP client today.

Speakers

Akshat Khanna

Machine Learning Engineer II, Independent

Friday August 14, 2026 16:35 - 17:00 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Agent Architecture + Orchestration

17:05 KST

When Dashboards Lie: Building MCP Tools That Chase Down the Truth - Hrittik Roy, vCluster & Aditya Soni, SailPoint

Friday August 14, 2026 17:05 - 17:30 KST

Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Dashboards lie. Not maliciously, structurally. Aggregation hides the tenant on fire. Sampling drops slow requests. The p99 looks fine because 47 users who timed out are a rounding error. Every SRE has lived this: green screen, Slack on fire, hunting across five tools to find what the dashboard refused to show.

This is a field report from building MCP tools that do the hunting. The agent does not replace the SRE. It does the grunt work nobody has time for at 3 AM: pulling exemplar logs for the slowest 0.1 percent, correlating a deploy against error rates, checking if the metric was even reporting.

1. Why dashboards lie. Sampling, aggregation, the "aggregate green, individual red" pattern.
2. MCP tool design for truth-seeking. Read-only vs side-effecting split, partial-data schemas, outputs that make the model admit uncertainty instead of hallucinating "all good."
3. Correlation loops that work. Deploy to error rate to exemplar logs to suspected change, not seventeen tabs.
4. Guardrails from production. Prompt injection in logs, cost blow-ups, tools we took back after one bad incident.

Attendees leave with patterns for MCP tools that chase down what dashboards will not show.

Speakers

Hrittik Roy

TPME, vCluster

Hrittik is a Platform Advocate at Loft Labs and a CNCF Ambassador, with expertise in cloud native technologies and open source communities. He has contributed extensively to developer advocacy, technical writing, and community engagement. Hrittik has been a featured speaker at events... Read More →

Aditya Soni

CNCF Ambassador, Senior DevOps Engineer, SailPoint

Aditya Soni is a DevOps/SRE tech professional He worked with Product and Service based companies including Red Hat, Forrester Research, Searce, and is currently positioned at SailPoint as a Senior DevOps Engineer. He holds AWS, GCP, Azure, RedHat, and Kubernetes Certifications.He... Read More →

Friday August 14, 2026 17:05 - 17:30 KST
Grand Ballroom 1 + 2

Building with MCP

09:30 KST

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10:55 KST

11:25 KST

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16:45 KST

09:30 KST

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11:30 KST

12:00 KST

12:30 KST

14:25 KST

14:55 KST

15:25 KST

16:05 KST

16:35 KST

17:05 KST

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