adaptTo() 2026 Arbory Digital Recap: Edge Delivery, AI Skills and the Future of AEM Development

The 15th adaptTo() Conference: A Recap of What You Need to Know

This year was the 15th year of the adaptTo() Conference in Berlin, the longest-running AEM technical conference in the world. To summarize, however: if you're a technical professional in the AEM space and are looking to further your career and your customers' technical success, attending (or catching-up on) this conference is one of the most critical things for you to do each year.

Let's talk about what got covered!

Pre adaptTo() Bike Ride

This year was my third time attending the conference in person (two "virtual" attendances during the COVID years as well). Like last year, we kicked off this year's conference the day before it started, with a pre-conference bike ride.

Before the sessions started, the Arbory Digital team and friends from the AEM community got on bikes for our annual pre-adaptTo() ride, a tradition that is now in it’s second year. Check out last year's pre-adaptTo() ride here.

This year, 15 other conference-goers met up near the general neighborhood of the conference for some coffee & conversation. Then, we set off for a 25-km ride through a number of Berlin's scenic neighborhoods and landmarks. We rode through Brandenberg Gate, past the Reichstag and miraculously missing most of the crowds from the massive Berlin Marathon which had just finished.

We then took up a relaxing pace through the Tiergarten, the lack of cars allowing the AEM Pros on the ride plenty of time to chat each other up, and catch up on what've all been up to. The final destination was an amazing Uzbek restaurant near the Berlin Zoo.

All told, this was a fabulous way to get oriented, get fresh air, and get ready for the INCREDIBLE series of technical talks the next 3 days of the conference would bring!

Day 1: AI Takes Center Stage

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adaptTo() turned 15 this year, and the opening session celebrated the milestone. Fifteen years in, the conference is still where the AEM developer community comes to talk about what’s next.

MCP and agents dominated the agenda. Half of Day 1's sessions focused on AI, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) came up again and again. “Agents Don’t Browse: AEM in the Age of AI” set the tone with a simple question: what happens to a web platform when more of its visitors are AI agents, not people?

One of my most-repeatedly-referenced talks already was Divanshu and Pranay's talk on their early experience with running the AEM MCP in production. Everyone knows there are so many powerful ways to automate and accelerate content production and deployment using Adobe's AI skills and MCP servers, but this brilliant talk put into perspective exactly how thoroughly we all have to reconfigure our own perceptions of what "being an architect" means in this era of AI.

For one thing, permission management, and the very nature of testing has to be completely re-thought in this day & age.

“One AEM MCP Server to Rule Them All” delivered by Mr. MCP himself (Tanju Erinmez from Adobe) and “Develop Faster with AEM AI Tooling” brought AI into the developer’s own workflow. The takeaway: MCP is no longer an experiment for AEM teams. It’s becoming part of the platform.

Migrations get an agentic upgrade. “Migrate to AEM Cloud Service Faster: An Agentic Workflow with MCP and Adobe Migration Skills” showed how AI agents can speed up a process that has always been slow and manual, and also re-arranges how we all should be thinking about the way we approach a Cloud Service migration (OR a 6.5 LTS migration for that matter!!)

Definitely give Himani's presentation a watch here. I've done a number of Cloud Service migrations in the past, and have also estimated 6.5 LTS migrations that seemed hopeless - but this changes a lot of the math.

The fundamentals still matter though. As a long-time AEM DevOps engineer, I found Dominik & Tudor's talk on AEM scaling & resilience to be ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING. If you've ever struggled with AEM downtime, or wondered about the ingredients that goes into the challenging nature of horizontally or vertically-scaling an AEM Publish or Author tier, please absolutely take the time to watch their presentation here:

Day 2: AI Skills + the New Adobe Experience Workspace

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The first session up on Day 2 was Jack Jin and AEM Asset Pro Katie Phillips, discussing some very fun ways that they automated content migration to Edge Delivery Services using an effective, home-grown solution agentic migration.

I found this absolutely fascinating. Especially also because, with the amount of work we've been putting in this year with automating the migration to Edge Delivery. I feel like it's a bit like how the Bessemer process for steelmaking was sort of simultaneously "discovered" in both the US and the UK by independent folks trying urgently to solve the same problems. Just a delight to watch their talk.

“Spellforge to Experience Workspace: Building a Skill-Driven Agent System for DA/AEM” showed how skills-based agents and Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker are driving major changes to what folks expect from an authoring workflow. In my opinion there is SO MUCH that is going to change over the next year or two with how the majority of cutting-edge orgs author, with a lot of that change centered around what they SHOULD expect their chat interfaces and MCPs to be able to successfully do for them.

As you can see from the image above, an event spy photographer caught me chatting up Natalia after her talk as there is so much one can possibly do with this interface and we're only scratching the surface. This also was a major part of the later post-adaptTo() AEM Meetup we did in Munich the day after the conference!

On the architecture side, “Hybrid AEM Architecture: Bridging Server-Side Rendering with Headless React at the Component Level” tackled how to mix traditional AEM rendering with headless front ends (something one can't discount - some orgs are still all-in on headless), and “Tales from the AEM Migration Trenches” shared lessons from teams who have been through Edge Delivery migrations firsthand, delivered by Karl Pauls and David Catalan - the architects behind quasi-magical Adobe's Experience Modernization Agent.

Some of the day's closing sessions took on a newer challenge: how brands show up when people search through AI. “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Pre/Post Experimentation for Brand Visibility in LLMs,” was a fascinating look into Adobe Brand Visibility (the artist formerly known as LLM Optimizer), a topic we've had a LOT of fun researching & implementing (i.e. see our podcast on Adobe's Edge Optimization & the use of LLM Optimizer.)

Then, it was an absolute treat to watch Paweł and Marek present “From Cache Invalidation to Continuous Materialization” to close out the day. We've been working with the brilliant folks from Streamx for some years now, and recently put into production a solution based on the very thing they showed, something we CAN'T WAIT to show you all on an upcoming podcast. :)

Spiritually-Succeeding AEM: Advanced Author Customization in DA

Day 2 was also time for my talk! This was my third time on the adaptTo() stage, and got to present with Laurel Timko, Lead Software Developer at JMP Statistical Discovery, who worked with me extensively during the entirety of the JMP Edge Delivery migration (the first customer website to go live on Document Authoring for Edge Delivery).

Our presentation centered on how one of the key strengths that has been with AEM since day 1 has been intense authoring customizability. While CX Coworker and other chat interfaces are absolutely immensely powerful, there are a vast number of enterprise use cases that are best-handled with an author is given the exact guardrails and pre-vis for the type of data they'll be handling.

Basically, EVERY enterprise site is still going to need very-custom authoring interfaces, and DA (now known as Experience Workspace) is absolutely LOVELY to work with when it comes to rapidly whipping together authoring UI's for custom data types.

It was a very fun presentation to give, and I hope folks found it useful! Our slides for the presentation are available on the adaptTo() site here.

The Meet the Experts Sessions

At the end of Day 2 was one of my very favorite parts of adaptTo(), which is the Meet the Experts session. I need to re-emphasize that one of the most valuable aspects of the adaptTo() conference is the intense availability of experts (both from Adobe and from the community) who have been in the trenches implementing, or who have been in the bunker DESIGNING the very systems that we work on for our jobs.

The Meet the Experts session is the distillation of this experience, with named experts getting doled out to tables in the conference hall so that everyone can go ask all their burning questions to the folks who are living it all day long. The sessions this year were:

• AEM Development & AI (AEM AI tooling & migration skills)
• AEM Content Management & AI (AEM MCP server & Content AI)
• AEM DevOps (Cloud Manager, AEMaaCS infrastructure, Security & Dependencies)
• Edge Delivery Services (Document Authoring / Experience Workspace, Migration to Edge Delivery Services)
• Tooling & Architecture (Caching / continuous materialization, content supply chain, Comparador, headless React)

This year I got to man the Edge Delivery Services table, and had a blast answering questions, but also peppering Adobe engineers across the table with my own questions about the future plans for Experience Workspace.

Day 3: AI in Practice, Plus a Lightning Round

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Day 3 packed in 14 sessions if you include the 7 "lightning talks" at the end, which were fabulous as always.

AI agents across the platform. The “Reimagining AEM Forms Rule Authoring with Coding Agents” demonstrated a chat-based UI for creating AEM Forms, something that was particularly timely given that I'm right smack in the middle of an Edge Delivery and AEM Forms Cloud Service implementation presently!

Migrations and assets at scale. I also really loved Martin's “Tracking Through the Transition” session, which addressed keeping analytics working during a migration - but also WHEN it is you should be scoping & working out your analytics migration strategy when moving platforms. Short answer: you're almost certainly not looking early enough.

And FYI AEM Can Do Basically Anything

Then, for what will likely go down in history as the most complicated live demo ever attempted at adaptTo(), Lisa Brown took what was a joke about AEM's vast capabilities and actually made it REAL. The running joke was that "...AEM can do almost anything, it could even make you pancakes." Well, in this case, Lisa demonstrated such a thing LIVE ON STAGE with AEM and Adobe Commerce actuating a robotic pancake maker live on stage.

Relive her preso here, especially if you think your little demo seems "too complicated" to attempt on-stage, then have a look at the number of things Lisa's demo did live.

Celebrating the community. “15 Years of Women at adaptTo(): The Facts and the Untold Stories Behind the Numbers” was a fitting part of the anniversary, which both informed and celebrated how much women have increasingly been vibrantly at the center of both the conference itself as well as the AEM world we enjoy.

Letting the Next Generation in on the adaptTo() Fun

Fittingly, as well, my daughter Mackenzie got a chance to see that presentation, as she got a chance to come with me to Berlin, and worked before & during the conference as adaptTo()'s first Conference Intern!

This basically was a "dream conference" experience for me, as there literally is nothing in the world better than getting to share my career, this conference, and all my many friends with my daughter. Thank you so much to the diva-e team and specifically to Roman and Berta for making this experience so wonderful for her, you really are like family.

Final Thoughts

If there is one message that anyone could perceive through 3 days and 33 different presentations, the fact of AI being an intrinsic part of the AEM developer experience has not diminished at all the degree of involvement, expertise and care that a content management system technologist has to bring to bear on our profession. With every new thing that a tool can help automate, that only broadens our potential reach and scope to more tools and techniques.

Thank you to diva-e and the adaptTo() organizers for 15 years of bringing this community together. We’re already looking forward to 2027.