Andrew Cunningham

Well that was fun. The MACH X conference in London signified a key inflexion point for the MACH Alliance, whilst the slightly cumbersome acronym has served an important purpose in the formation of the Alliance, the more recent focus on Composable has created the perfect segue into the world of agentic. From various conversations with vendors and customers alike, it became abundantly clear that those organisations that have adopted composable architectures are far better placed to adopt agentic solutions in the future. There were a few key take-aways from this year's event for me, and a number of "aha" moments that make MACH events a critical part of the calendar. 💡 Some of the most important techies to enable the realisation of an agentic future were not present. Specifically those providing the data platforms for our enterprises, and the platform engineering leads orchestrating the deployment and management of our solutions. In the world of agentic, those two teams need to be front and centre, as without their support and input we risk creating a fragile agentic ecosystem prone to failure. As Dr Arthur O'Connor informed us, "less than 5% of agentic deployments in the enterprise to date have been successfully scaled". 💡 Boy is security important. It's easy to get carried away with the freedom to chain agents together to produce automated workflows and new capabilities, but we've just created the most elegant attack vector for hackers to poison these workflows or more importantly, introduce 'prompt injection' that allows them to carry out background activities without the knowledge of the initiator. This is even more true when considering the recent advent of AI browsers, given the trust end users are willing to make bookings on their behalf, how easy could it be for a nefarious agent in the workflow to collect credentials? 💡It's early days for agentic commerce, but important days nonetheless. The advent of the OpenAI agentic commerce protocol and AP2 from Google is a key step in the right direction, but one thing that was clear from conversations in the room is that the majority of our consumers are not yet ready for this. That's not to say they won't be, and soon, but the old Douglas Adams adage "Don't Panic" should ring true for most eCommerce businesses. The focus needs to be on incremental steps, fixing up your data, making your API's agent-ready and becoming best buddies with your CISO are all key steps in the process. It was great to spend time with so many smart, engaging and in some cases, tolerant people. A special mention to Jamie Hancox (one day I'll stop being your bitch), Komal Koul (my partner in crime), Jason Cottrell (many sleepless nights await), Jasmin Guthmann (my new found kindred spirit regarding dog training), Holly Hall (for the opportunity and terrible group photos) and many more. And finally, apologies to anyone I inadvertently offended over the past few days 😊 #machX #machalliance

122

5 Comments

I think this is the only tech announcement this year that doesn't include any mention of AI – let's see if the algorithm will bury it. Over the last ten years, we've seen an incredibly wide variety of delivery environments, from greenfield efforts to crisis response. We've seen valuable time wasted when struggling to add flexibility to overbuilt "COTS" solutions, as well as months relearning core lessons around accessibility or infrastructure as code. On the Nava side, one of our values is delivery over dogma – we're ruthlessly focused on how to move scalable systems to production, and how to quickly iterate to continue to deliver for our partners and end users. I'm excited to share that we're open sourcing our stack, and sharing Nava Strata, a suite of tools and components that gives government agencies everything they need to run modern digital services. We've launched critical federal and state services into production with these tools, but our goal isn't to be prescriptive. Strata allows teams to deploy quickly within AWS or Azure environments with clear paths to ATO in both federal and state environments, with multiple application templates to quickly deploy backend APIs, accessible and mobile-friendly user experiences, or quickly composing forms or business processes. We've designed the components as a part of Strata to be able to be used together or separately, allowing your teams to decide what best suits the delivery environment they're operating in. It's exciting for us to share this with the world, and we're encouraged by both government and vendor teams applying Strata in other contexts. I hope you'll take a look: https://lnkd.in/emxycvaG

162

6 Comments