Takeaways of WEBCON DAY 2026

This is not my typical technically focused blog post but instead my ideas on what the near future of WEBCON will look like for WEBCON end users, and especially power users/developers.

While no one can foresee the future and I’m just as likely to be wrong as right, I decided to create this post instead of writing a LinkedIn post. This way I can come back in two years and compare the situation with my guesses from the past.

2027 R1 will be evolution and revolution at the same time

While the previous major releases of WEBCON have been mostly an evolution, it’s a little different this time. It’s still an evolution, but only for the end users. Yes, there will be new AI capabilities, but these have also been introduced in the past. These have “creeped” in over time and became more and more powerful. Therefore it’s not a revolution for them, but the new Designer Studio and everything this entails is one.

I want to use the new Designer Studio

While I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first heard of it from Mike Fitzmaurice four years ago, this has changed. That’s partly due to the fact that some of my concerns have been taken into account, maybe accidentally, but the main reason is, that I see so many opportunities to improve our lives with little changes, that I want to use it as soon as possible and try, whether I can add these modifications. Ok, I’m just a little boy who wants to see whether his new toy can be taken apart and refitted. :)

Here’s why I want to use the new Designer Studio. I’ve used the ✅ for features, which already exist and the ❓for “simple” ideas.

• ✅ Less context switching while developing by using multiple tabs instead of Designer Studios.
• ❓Start where you left off, on process level We could have something like ‘recently used (modified) processes’. This could display the last 5, 10 whatever processes you worked on, when opening the Designer Studio.
• ❓A link in the workflow instance history to open the current form / step / action This can be especially helpful in the case of errors. Displaying an “open action configuration” link from the message dialog could bring you there immediately. No more navigating around just a single click. Would also be nice to have an option to open it in DEV, but this would require a configuration for each environment and a mapping of the databases. In the worst case the different environments aren’t even accessible. Copying the URL path after the DB id with the GUID is no big issue, but it would be convenient anyway. :)
• ❓ The same could be added to the diagnostic mode / trace :)
• ✅Automated spell check, browser feature. Makes me wonder what other browser features / extensions can be used. :)
• ✅ Improved usages with linking / opening the elements “missing” usages, which were only visible when you tried to delete the element
• ✅ New Fields will be visible immediately :)
• ✅ No more workarounds for running different versions or the need to have a Windows environment.

With those opportunities in mind, who wants to continue to use the Desktop application?

New Designer Studio and AI

Sometimes all it takes is a single question at what seemed like a boring conference to set something much bigger in motion:

• The new Designer Studio is web-based
• AI can easily interact with web-based solutions
• Is it worth to explore whether AI can interact with the new Designer Studio?

This question was born in June 2026 and four months later we have seen a preview of how we may interact with the Designer Studio in the future. While I haven’t seen it in action and it may only work flawlessly for a few parts, I doubt that it will take more than two years to implement it in a reliable working way. Yes, this is just looking in the crystal ball, but if you take a look at AI improvements in general, it doesn’t seem to be far-fetched.

AI agents with personality

During WEBCON DAY 2026, a conversation came up that AI will be able to interact with WEBCON to create processes. This doesn’t mean though that anyone can create proper processes and that we need to have people with the correct mindset/understanding to achieve this.

I thought of the AI agent personalities which have been mentioned during the WEBCON DAY. An AI agent will no longer be an abstract prompt but instead it will gain a memory, access control and related, like an actual user. If this personalized AI agent can be used in processes, why shouldn’t you be able to apply the same when interacting with the Designer Studio AI?

Another aspect of the AI personalities will be that users may interact with them instead of a general purpose chat to achieve something. Everyone of us remembers the few people in our company who can help you with HR, IT and similar topics. That will be the same with named AI agents.

Future of WEBCON power users and developers

If I take everything of this into account:

• New Designer Studio
• AI working with Designer Studio
• Evolution of AI in general

my best guess is, that AI will be able to generate and modify processes in two years in a ‘good-enough’ version. While it pains me to say this, if it’s good-enough why should you spend more effort? Just to fulfill your personal preferences to make it all shiny?

Yes, I assume that there will be cases where you need to review everything because it’s critical from various perspectives may it be business, IT, security or whatever. I would guess though, that these are maybe 20% of the processes you are then able to create. It will be interesting to see, how the WEBCON will then handle those from a governance perspective, but that is also on the roadmap.

My guess is that the experienced WEBCON power users will be focused on governance, improving the AI agent personalities, troubleshooting and even less on development than today.

Marketplace

The marketplace idea dates back years. I can imagine a few reasons why it took so long and the reason why it’s going to be birthed soon is, again, AI. It just frees up resources which helps a lot while the indirect pressures of competitors is probably another reason. In today’s world it’s almost a requirement, but not such a big one as to ‘have’ AI.

In the first phase it will contain SDKs and maybe other strictly coupled components. Providing whole applications that can be purchased is on another level. Especially if these are the IP of partners which needs to be protected from disclosure. Think about a WEBCON customer, whose partner has access to the environment and the customer purchases an application from another partner. Let’s ignore some other technical interesting things like global artifacts:

• Global fields
• Constants
• Data source
• Business entities

At the same time everyone of us is used to amend processes. All of this builds up to an interesting challenge.

Then again we have AI which can already create SDKs on its own today and working applications in the near future.

What does this mean for the marketplace for those who are publishing artifacts? Maybe it will just be a place to create a reputation for yourself.

Partners

If I’m even only partially right, the partner business will have to change. As far as I’m aware there are two income routes for partners:

• An application which is sold or can be subscribed to
• Contract working

The latter one is often the case, when the customer doesn’t have the resources to do the implementation themselves, may it be the talent or time. That’s one major income source. This will change with the AI Designer Studio. Why should you explain everything to a partner, if you could explain it to an AI personality? At the same time, it can also improve the efficiency of the partners which can reduce the costs.

Regardless of how this will evolve, one thing is for sure, the implementation effort will be reduced even further and therefore the income from this.

From my perspective, partners who rely on the implementation as an income source need to ensure, that their employees are not only good at implementing, but also understand the industry of their customers so that they can speak with them in their language and guide them in tackling problems specific to their industry. Only this will ensure that they can offer a benefit for their customers.

The other option is to train the employees so that they can help the customer to improve the AI personalities as well as supporting them with the already mentioned shift of WEBCON developers.

Customers with AI restrictions

Everything mentioned so far assumes, that we have a working AI model most likely cloud-based. But there are cases in which this won’t be the case and you have to make use of your own AI model. This will be another perspective for partners, either by providing one or helping the customer to implement this on their own.

Running old WEBCON versions

The release of 2027 R1 should be taken as the starting point to plan upgrading WEBCON to a new version. While this is easier said than done, I would use this time to plan and test the upgrade to the new version. Now you have the time to spend a few months on this. The planned feature parity of the web Designer Studio is the end of May next year and it will likely take even more time for the real working AI-driven Designer Studio, or however this will be called, but this just means you can use this time as a grace period and make yourself familiar with the upcoming opportunities. I wouldn’t want to wait until everything is fully fledged, then you will hit an even harder learning curve.

Employees

The way employees will use company software has to change, especially if you think about the younger generation. Those may never want to learn how to use an application without AI. Is this an exaggeration? Maybe, but only slightly. In another conversation during WEBCON DAY 2026 I learned that someone had to train new employees on how to use a computer mouse and keyboard. They are just so accustomed to using touch interfaces, that they don’t have these ‘common’ skills.

Why am I mentioning this? If they don’t know how to use a mouse, do you think they are attracted to working in the old Designer Studio or remembering how to navigate to which process? The 2027 R1 release will be the first step in ensuring that the new generation will want to use WEBCON.

Final comment

Maybe this is just me rambling while being tired on my way back home from WEBCON DAY 2026. Maybe there’s some truth there based on ‘educated guesses’, who knows? The future will show whether I’m just pessimistic, after all I’m working for a partner and not an end customer, or a few of these guesses turned out to be correct.

Thanks for your time reading so far and if there’s one thing you should keep in mind then it’s the following. The IT is the only industry which is actively working against its own professions. I’m not aware of any other. The ‘RIP’ below is deliberate: each of these roles was once essential but was eventually made redundant by the very technology it helped build.

• RIP Punch cards Mainstream use ended in the late 1970s when time-sharing terminals took over; IBM ceased punch card production in 1984.
• RIP Assembler programmers The rise of C (1972) and later higher-level languages moved most development away from assembly within a decade.
• High level programmers, your grave is currently prepared AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) already generate, review, and refactor code at scale; the trend is accelerating with each model generation.
• RIP data scientists, a profession whose life span was even shorter Barely a decade after Harvard Business Review called it “the sexiest job of the 21st century” (2012), AutoML platforms and AI models handle data wrangling, feature engineering, and model selection with little human input.

Ok, I may be exaggerating, but it just shows, that the IT renews its jobs and this will apply to the way we will be using WEBCON too.