We talked to leading platform engineers. Here’s what they actually agree on going into 2026.

We recently gathered 12 platform engineering leaders to be Port Builders. They’re from some of our most forward-thinking customers like GitHub, Yum, Sportradar, PwC, Priceline, SPS Commerce, Visa, Thomson Reuters, MathWorks, and Serko. Because they spend so much time building Port, they have lots of opinions about Port’s future and the future of the industry. And we want to listen.

We aimed to have a wide range of representatives there. Mature customers and newer customers. Customers who are at the beginning stages of their agentic engineering journey and customers who are pushing it to its limits.

No matter what their stage, the goal of the day for everyone was simple (but certainly not easy). 

Just answer this question: What will engineering look like one year from now?

Predicting the exact future is impossible. But since our customers are building their agentic SDLC on Port, we can actually be part of creating that future.

We’re learning alongside our customers who are leading the way in agentic engineering. Our Port builders and the wider community are our teachers. The things we learn from them, we build right back into the platform for the benefit of all customers.

So, what did we talk about?

After half a day of presentations and discussions, here's what stood out:

Platform teams are now building for two personas: humans AND agents

The most consistent theme was that human workflows and AI workflows are converging. But it turns out that they both need the same things: 

• access to a rich software catalog
• the ability to trigger actions
• scorecards to stay ahead of standards
• access controls to keep them on the right path

One Port builder said: the internal developer portal is becoming the "central nervous system" for engineering. Not just for developers, but for autonomous systems too.

The real AI blocker is guardrails

Before the session, we wondered whether the conversation would focus on AI reliability or hallucinations. It didn't.

Instead, Ryan from Yum talked about his worries regarding security: "Building these workflows is easy. Showing value is easy. It's proving how security is embedded into the process - that’s the tricky part."

The models work. The workflows deliver. What's holding teams back is governance, granular permissions, audit trails, and making sure agents act as the user, and not as a god-mode service account.

AI applied to specific workflows always beats AI everywhere

Meirav from GitHub shared an approach that had everyone else nodding in agreement: "We stopped trying to insert AI everywhere. Instead, we found workflows that were bottlenecks, and surgically apply AI to specific, high-impact workflow bottlenecks".

The secondary benefit of applying AI locally, is that the ROI becomes obvious. One team reduced new service creation from weeks to hours. Again, not by sprinkling AI everywhere, but by targeting one painful workflow.

The metric that matters: time to comprehension

A few Port Builders agreed that one job doesn't get enough attention: time to comprehension. In other words: how long does it take for a developer or AI agent to gather enough context before it can accurately complete its task?

SPS Commerce actually measured it in a comprehensive time study. Before their portal rollout: it took nearly 60 minutes to understand a service and its dependencies. After the rollout: just 16 minutes. A 65% reduction.

Richard from Sportradar talked about his developer enablement team. He shared that their north star metric is "developer hours saved." Not lines of code or deployments. Time returned to engineers (that they can use elsewhere).

What's next

This was the first time we gathered Port builders to discuss the future of Port. It definitely won't be our last. If there's one thing we love doing at Port it's staying in close contact with our customers.

We're building a community of platform engineering leaders who are shaping what comes next. You too can influence the future of Port through our Slack community, public roadmap (did you know that you can vote for features?), or just by saying hi wherever you see us.