Drupal AI Summit New York City 2026 | Drupal.org

Drupal AI Summit New York City 2026 | Drupal.org
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Drupal AI Summit New York City 2026
Drupal AI Summit New York City 2026
14th May 2026
etc venues, 360 Madison Ave, NYC
A packed agenda bringing together leading AI experts and clients showcasing their success stories using Drupal AI.
Secure your ticket today!
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Strategic Perspective on AI for Organizations
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Global Experts Converge in New York
Leaders and practitioners from across the world will gather in New York City to share real experience delivering AI in enterprise and public sector environments.
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13 Expert-Led Sessions to Inspire Action
Explore practical case studies from peers and organisations applying AI in production. Gain insights you can adapt to your own context, turning experiments into dependable systems that deliver measurable business value.
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Real Business Needs Open Source Solutions
Gain clear, practical guidance on how to apply AI to your own business requirements using open source systems that support sovereignty, sound governance and responsible use.
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One pass, access all areas. 100+ Sessions, 1000+ companies
Our summit pass grants your entry to the wider two day API Days New York event. 2000+ delegates, 100+ speakers. Connecting you with communities exploring APIs, AI, agents, cyber security and modern digital infrastructure.
About the Drupal AI Summit
Attendees at Drupal AI Summit Paris 2025 (Sold out)
For many organisations, the question is no longer whether AI will shape their digital strategy, but how it can be implemented in a way that is dependable, governed, and capable of delivering measurable value.
The Drupal AI Summit NYC offers a focused environment for decision makers who must move beyond experimentation and establish AI as a reliable part of their digital infrastructure.
Bringing together experienced practitioners, platform leaders and organisations already applying AI in production, the AI Summit will provide grounded insight into what works in practice.
For those responsible for complex platforms operating within regulated or large scale environments, it offers an opportunity to learn directly from peers and experts who are addressing the same architectural, operational and governance challenges.
The format
Co-located with
apidays New York
, the Summit is designed for enterprise platform owners, digital leaders, CTOs, and senior practitioners who are responsible for turning AI from isolated experiments into dependable systems.
14th May 2026 09:00 am - 5:45 pm
etc venues
, 360 Madison Ave, NYC
Featured Speakers
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Matthew Saunders, AI Ambassador, amazee.io
Matthew Saunders is an AI Ambassador at amazee.io and a long-time Drupal leader with two decades of contribution. He helps organizations adopt practical, secure AI within Drupal, with a focus on data sovereignty, enterprise delivery, and neuro-inclusive design.
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Josh Koenig, Co-Founder & SVP of Marketing, Pantheon
Josh has been a part of the Drupal ecosystem for over 20 years, and has spent his career focused on helping web teams deliver faster, with less stress, and more impact. With the open web being torn apart and reassembled by AI, the role of open source and web teams is more important than ever.
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Jeroen Spitaels, COO, Dropsolid AI
Jeroen Spitaels is COO of Dropsolid AI, where he builds AI-powered digital experience platforms on Drupal and open-source technologies. He helps organisations move from experimentation to scalable, production-ready AI aligned with real business outcomes.
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Martin Anderson-Clutz, Sr PMM, Acquia
Martin Anderson-Clutz is a Drupal specialist and web professional based in London, Ontario, with a background in design and nearly two decades of Drupal experience. He is a speaker, module maintainer, and podcast contributor focused on making Drupal and AI more human-centred and practical.
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Michael Schmid, Founder and General Manager, amazee.io
Michael Schmid is Founder and General Manager of amazee.io and a long-standing contributor to the open source ecosystem. He has led the growth of a globally distributed organisation while advancing open source, container-based hosting solutions, including a focus on Private-by-Design AI infrastrucutre for Drupal.
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James Abrahams, Founder, Freelygive
James Abrahams is the cofounder of FreelyGive, a technology agency specialising in native Drupal CRM and business applications. He is a thought leader in Drupal AI and plays a key role in shaping the direction of AI within the platform, contributing from a strategic and product perspective.
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Rob Loach, Associate Director of Research and Innovation, Kalamuna
Rob Loach is an open-source architect with nearly two decades of experience, leading research and innovation at Kalamuna. He helps shape AI integration in Drupal as part of the AI Release Management Team, focusing on practical, forward-looking solutions.
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Kristen Pol, Senior Technologist, Salsa Digital
Kristen Pol is Program Manager for the Drupal AI Initiative, coordinating efforts to bring practical, responsible AI into Drupal. She helps turn AI concepts into production-ready features and focuses on making AI governable, accurate, and usable at scale.
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Jonathan Bourland, Associate Director, CivicActions
Jonathan is an Associate Director of Drupal at CivicActions where he supports Drupal for government clients. Jonathan is a maintainer on the AI Migration module, which imports arbitrary HTML into structured Drupal entities.
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John Tran, CTO, ImageX
John builds innovative technical solutions for global brands, helping organizations get real value from their technology while staying focused on business goals. Before ImageX, he founded a technical agency serving Electronic Arts and later led technology at a WPP agency supporting major clients.
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Kristof Van Tomme, CEO/co-founder, PROVONIX
Kristof Van Tomme is co-founder of Pronovix, where he has spent over a decade building developer portals in Drupal. The company recently joined the Drupal AI Initiative. An active member of the Drupal, Write the Docs, and APIDays communities, he focuses on how AI is reshaping APIs, documentation, and developer portals.
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John Doyle, CEO, Digital Polygon
John Doyle is CEO of Digital Polygon, a WebOps agency focused on open source. With 18+ years as a software architect, he leads delivery of scalable, enterprise-grade solutions. He works at the intersection of Drupal and AI, helping organisations move past hype to implement practical automation and WebOps strategies that deliver measurable results.
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Scott Delea, Vice President, Source CMS, Acquia
Scott Delea is Vice President of Sales for Acquia Source, leading go-to-market strategy for AI-powered, SaaS-based Drupal CMS solutions. With 25 years in digital experience, he has worked across marketing, agencies, and enterprise SaaS. Active in the Drupal community for over a decade, he focuses on helping organisations move beyond AI experimentation through structured data and schema-first approaches.
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Christoph Breidert - Founder and CIO, 1xINTERNET
Christoph co-founded 1xINTERNET in 2013, growing it into a leading European digital agency specialising in Drupal, with offices across Germany, Spain, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. He is also a founding leader of the Drupal AI Initiative, helping shape its direction around ethical, transparent, and provider-agnostic AI in Drupal, including content, agents, accessibility, and compliance.
The Agenda
Attendees will hear from global leaders and experienced AI practitioners who are actively delivering AI inside enterprise and public-sector organizations. Sessions will focus on case studies, shared best practices, and emerging approaches that are already being applied in production environments, helping organizations stay ahead by learning what actually works.
Bridging Strategy and Execution
Those attending can expect sessions grounded in real experience, demonstrations with clear purpose and discussions focused on long term value. For organizations assessing how AI will influence their digital estate, the summit will provide an informed and practical perspective.
The compelling case for open source
The Summit will highlight the role of open source platforms in making responsible AI adoption practical. Drupal AI demonstrates how AI can be embedded directly into content, data, and workflow systems, where enterprise work actually happens, while preserving transparency, extensibility, and organizational control. This perspective resonates beyond Drupal, offering value to teams working across open source ecosystems who face similar enterprise constraints.
Access all events across 13-14th May
Your summit pass grants entry to all conferences at
API Days New York City
across 13–14 May. The wider event connects communities exploring APIs, AI, agents, sustainability, cyber security and modern digital infrastructure, providing a collaborative environment for developers, architects, researchers and decision makers to share practical insights. Expect 2000+ delegates, 1000+ companies,100+ Sessions, 100+ Speakers.
Early bird tickets available now
A limited number of early bird tickets are available at just $150 until 13 April 2026.
Our last event in Paris sold out.
Book early to avoid disappointment.
Secure your ticket today!
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Schedule
Drupal AI Summit Moderator
Matthew Saunders, AI Ambassador — amazee.io
Matthew Saunders is an AI Ambassador at amazee.io and a long-time leader in the Drupal community. He has spent years working at the intersection of open source, digital platforms, and emerging technology, with a focus on making complex systems practical and usable in real organisations.
As a moderator, Matthew brings a clear, grounded perspective to conversations about AI. His work centres on how AI actually operates in production, including governance, data sovereignty, and the realities of integrating AI into existing platforms and workflows.
At the Drupal AI Summit NYC, he will guide discussions toward substance over theory, helping surface real insights from practitioners and ensuring the conversation stays focused on what it takes to run AI systems responsibly at scale.
The AI-Driven DXP: New Horizons for Marketers
Martin Anderson-Clutz, Senior Product Marketing Manager — Acquia
The increasingly pervasive adoption of Artificial Intelligence has left few digital experience platforms untouched. But while many are quick to add AI-driven capabilities, there's a large question we should be discussing: In an AI-first internet, how does that change what a website should be?
In this talk we'll explore a variety of ways AI will impact the nature of what constitutes success: not just for content creation, but also how and in what format it should be discoverable by LLMs. We'll also explore how AI transforms how we should think about topics like personalization, analytics, and more.
Why Private AI Matters: Data Sovereignty as the Foundation for Trustworthy AI on the Open Web
Michael Schmid, Founder & General Manager — amazee.io
As organizations race to integrate AI into their digital platforms, a critical question is being overlooked: who actually controls the data? Today, 72% of organizations rank data privacy as their top AI concern, 44% have experienced sensitive data leaking into AI systems, and shadow AI is spreading unchecked. For enterprises running on open-source platforms like Drupal, the answer is not to avoid AI but to deploy it on infrastructure where data never leaves organizational control.
This session covers the three pillars of AI sovereignty — data, model, and operational sovereignty — and shows how open-source foundations like Drupal and Kubernetes make it possible to run AI without vendor lock-in, without cross-border data risk, and without sacrificing compliance. Drawing on real-world deployment patterns including private LLM proxies, region-locked vector databases, and open-source Drupal AI provider integrations, this talk connects the strategic "why" to the engineering "how."
Whether you are evaluating AI architecture, managing shadow AI risk, or building AI features into Drupal responsibly, you will leave with a clear framework for deploying AI that is powerful, auditable, and fully under your control.
Context-driven AI for consistent, compliant, and compelling content
Kristen Pol, AI Program Manager / Senior Technologist — Salsa Digital
AI can generate text, designs, and interfaces quickly, but without context the results are often off brand, non compliant, or underwhelming. Context turns guesswork into outputs that are accurate, consistent, and aligned with intent.
Drupal's Context Control Center provides a single place to define rules, policies, and guidelines, and apply them directly to AI. Whether it is compliance, tone, or accessibility, outputs stay aligned with organisational standards.
Imagine being able to say:
Every article summary must be 3 sentences under 300 characters.
Never use these restricted words.
Match accessibility standards automatically.
Keep the tone at an 8th-grade reading level.
Always use our brand colors and typography.
Instead of scattered briefs or prompts, rules are centralised so results remain consistent and reliable.
This session explains why context matters, which types have the greatest impact, and how to apply them in practice using Context Control Center.
AI-Assisted Site Migrations in Drupal
Rob Loach, Research & Innovation — Kalamuna
Migration has always been an important part of the Drupal ecosystem. Whether it be moving from WordPress to Drupal, or importing a bunch of CSV files, the Migrate API provides a robust framework for moving data. It also carries a steep learning curve.
Drupal CMS AI - No-code Visual AI Agent builder - Future of Agents
Jamie Abrahams, Co-founder — FreelyGive Ltd
Flowdrop UI for Agents is an intuitive visual interface layer for designing, building and managing AI agents, most often used within Drupal’s AI ecosystem. It is not an AI model in its own right, but an orchestration and design environment that sits above agent infrastructure, making complex workflows more accessible and manageable.
In this session, Jamie will demonstrate Flowdrop in practice, showing how it enables integration with external systems via MCP and supports the creation of AI agents using agent-driven approaches. The focus will be on how teams can move from concept to working implementations with greater clarity and control.
Looking ahead, the session will explore how agent-driven systems are beginning to generate and coordinate other agents, extending the reach of Drupal’s capabilities through AI. Tools such as Claude Code are already enabling near end to end automation, from Figma designs through to fully functioning Drupal sites and migrations. The next phase is likely to bring this level of orchestration directly into Drupal itself.
Attendees will leave with a clear view of current innovation within Drupal AI and a considered perspective on how these developments may evolve.
How AI helping EPSO be more efficient in a transparent way.
Jeroen Spitaels, Chief Revenue Officer — Dropsolid AI
The European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) recruits staff for the European Commission institutions and agencies. It organises competitions and assessments to select candidates based on merit, ensuring transparency and equal opportunities for permanent, temporary, and contract positions.
In this session, Jeroen will present how EPSO has integrated artificial intelligence into its online portal. He will outline the challenges encountered during implementation and the benefits realised since going live, encompassing both the evident and the less obvious outcomes.
Additionally, the session will provide insights into the measures taken to ensure transparency in the deployment of AI within the platform.
CMS in the post-AI Era: from MCP to Vibecoding
Joshua Koenig, Co-Founder — Pantheon
The open web is being torn apart and put back together, and the purpose of content management is up for grabs. Who it's for, what it tracks, how it operates — all of this is changing.
But AI is also blending in with the rest of the tech. The story is less and less about AI itself, but how it is applied so solve real world problems.
As the leading open source framework for structured content, now with a fully functional internal AI subsystem, Drupal can play a much needed role in helping mature organizations use AI to accelerate, without compromising sustainable practices or quality. Drupal can run agents, but it can also be run by agents. With a solid MCP server foundation and provider plugins for all major models, there's a clear path to go from vibe-coded prototype to sustainable production system, including running a scalable and sustainable content production pipeline.
Beyond Chatbots: Creating Smarter, Personalized Experiences in Drupal with AG-UI
John Tran, CTO — ImageX
Discover how Drupal can evolve beyond chatbots into a collaborative, AI-powered experience platform with  AG-UI.
This session shows how interactive AI agents can work directly within your Drupal site to support content teams, streamline workflows, and deliver more personalized, intuitive experiences for users, without adding technical complexity.
We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how businesses utilize Artificial Intelligence. The era of simple, text-based chatbots is ending. In its place, a new generation of "AI Agents" is emerging—intelligent digital assistants capable of reasoning, using tools, and collaborating with humans in real-time to customize content experiences. For Drupal site owners, marketers, and content teams, this opens up a powerful opportunity. Imagine your website becoming a collaborative workspace, where AI collaborates with your visitors to personalize experiences in real time as they interact with your content.
This session will introduce a new approach to bringing these interactive AI assistants into Drupal using a component-based toolkit built on AG-UI. While the technology runs behind the scenes, the experience is designed to feel natural and intuitive, AI that is embedded into your end user content experience, rather than in a disconnected pop-up.
We will demonstrate how this custom toolkit bridges the gap between complex AI logic and the intuitive Drupal user experience you expect.
Winning the AEO/GEO "Answer War": Why Structured Data is the Only AI Moat That Matters
Scott Delea, Vice President — Acquia
As search traffic is predicted to drop by 50% by 2028, the "Blue Link" era is over. We have entered the Answer War, where LLMs like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are the primary gatekeepers. This talk explores Drupal’s "accidental AI advantage": its deep, schema-first content modeling. Scott will detail a strategy for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), showing how to structure data so AI agents can introspect and cite your brand as the canonical source of truth.
Vibe coded static site or an AI native CMS? What is the best way to publish API documentation?
Kristof Van Tomme, CEO/co-founder — PROVONIX
Over the years there have been many different technology waves that have changed how teams build developer portals: Static site generators, MACH, or React based applications, a range of open source technologies like Backstage or Docusaurus. Through all these waves content management systems like Drupal have been a fixture, often brought in out of necessity when requirements for the portal reached a certain level of complexity. Now that AI is making it possible for tech writers to vibe code solutions for highly specific complex requirements, is there still a need for a CMS? In this talk I will explore the difference between vibe coded documentation portals and systems that use structured data formats to enable and constrain AI. Using two practical examples from the developer portal world, to help you decide what approach would be better for your use case.
Beyond the Prompt: Operationalizing the Human–AI Partnership as a Digital Teammate in Drupal
John Doyle, CEO — Digital Polygon
Most organizations are stuck in a loop of AI experimentation that never reaches production. The problem isn’t the models; it’s that we’re trying to build houses on sand. Without structure, governance, and reliable data flows, AI is just a parlor trick. Drupal is often overlooked in the AI conversation, but its greatest strength is exactly what AI needs: a robust, API-first architecture and a mature content model. In this session, I’ll show you how we’re moving past prompts to build digital teammates—AI agents that are governed, measurable, and embedded directly into real-world editorial and marketing workflows. We’ll look at a two-part framework for operationalizing AI in Drupal: Stop experimenting, start systemizing: How to define a digital teammate charter so AI has clear inputs, outputs, and SLAs. Moving Beyond the Sandbox: How to take the logic from your team’s best individual experiments—like custom GPTs or Gems—and bake them directly into Drupal. We’ll talk about how to turn isolated wins into shared, governed, human-in-the-loop workflows that actually move the needle for the entire organization.
Beyond "Extract-and-Dump": High-Fidelity Migrations with Drupal AI
Jonathan Bourland, Associate Director of Drupal — Civic Actions
A common failure in legacy migrations is the "extract-and-dump" trap: taking unstructured legacy HTML and shoving it into a single Drupal "Body" field – because the cost of field mapping is too expensive in terms of time and money. This creates immediate technical debt that sabotages content flexibility, and site extensibility; it dooms search, SEO, and future redesigns. The manual effort required to funnel unstructured legacy content into sophisticated target schemas remains a resource-intensive and high-friction endeavor.
While semantic migration for humans is hard, it’s easy for AI. So, let’s leverage it to create clean, structured data—and not just raw piles of HTML.
This session explores how the Drupal AI Migration module (https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_migration) bridges architectural vision and automated execution. Instead of letting AI guess your data model, we show a clever use of Drupal’s Serialization API to generate a JSON Schema from well-designed content types, providing the AI with a strict "contract" for the target data.
We will discuss how this approach allows an LLM to parse raw legacy HTML and precisely populate structured fields according to your specific schema. You’ll see how combining Drupal’s core strengths with AI-driven semantic parsing creates a high-integrity, queryable data layer that will serve your sites for years to come.
AI Content Intelligence: Taking Control of What AI Produces for Your Brand
Christoph Breidert - Founder and CIO, 1xINTERNET
AI is no longer a pilot project. It is becoming a core part of how organisations produce and manage content at scale. But moving from experimentation to everyday use raises a critical question: how do you maintain control over quality, brand standards, and legal risk whilst still gaining the benefits of AI?
This session presents a practical framework for doing exactly that. Rather than focusing on the technology itself, we will focus on what it means for the people responsible for brand, communications, and digital performance.
Key Discussion Points:
Getting More from Your Content:
Learn how AI can identify gaps and opportunities across your entire content estate, improving search visibility, accessibility compliance, and consistency of message across every channel and audience.
Protecting Your Brand and Reducing Risk:
Understand how to put the right guardrails in place so that AI-generated content does not expose your organisation to data privacy issues, reputational damage, or legal liability, before anything goes live.
Accountability for Leadership:
Discover how to build clear reporting structures that give senior leaders visibility into how AI is being used, what it is costing, and what return it is delivering, with a traceable record to support governance and compliance requirements.
By the end of this session, you will have a clearer picture of how to deploy AI content tools in a way that is consistent, measurable, and aligned with your organisation's standards, without sacrificing speed or quality.