DrupalCon Rotterdam: building Drupal’s AI future together

Opening DrupalCon, a summit about AI in the real world, and two Splash Awards for our customers. Rotterdam brought a lot together. My biggest takeaway: Drupal has the foundations to make AI useful while keeping people and organisations in control.

My first DrupalCon was Munich in 2012. I have written before about what that experience meant to me: finding a community, feeling part of something bigger, and seeing a future I wanted to help build. The same was true for Rotterdam. With Drupal AI, I can see the next decade for Drupal unfold.

Fourteen years later, I had the privilege of opening DrupalCon Rotterdam. That felt special. Drupal has shaped my career, the company we built, and many of the relationships that make this work worthwhile.

Looking back at what I shared on LinkedIn during the week, one thread connects the summit, the Driesnote and our customer projects. We are getting better at showing how Drupal can make AI useful in the everyday work of an organisation. And we are doing it with an open foundation that the organisation can understand, influence and keep control of.

Aboard the SS Rotterdam: adapting to a lasting change

On 28 September, the Enterprise AI Summit brought that conversation aboard the SS Rotterdam. When I shared the announcement, I described it as a place for decision makers to understand what Drupal AI could do for their organisations. That remains the right starting point for me.

The Enterprise AI Summit aboard the SS Rotterdam. Photo: Karl Hepworth, CC BY-SA 4.0.

I shared a few takeaways from the conversation with Dries Buytaert and Peter Hinssen: AI represents a lasting change; the pace of execution is accelerating; and organisations will need to adapt. We also discussed why Drupal's existing foundations matter so much in this new environment.

For me, adapting starts with a useful question. Where are people losing time? Where do customers struggle to find an answer? Which work needs an expert, and which repetitive steps could we help that expert get through?

Those questions give technology a purpose. They also give us something concrete to evaluate after the excitement of a demonstration has passed.

A big thank you to Frederik Wouters, the Drupal AI Initiative and everyone who helped make the summit happen. Bringing the people building the technology into the same conversation as the people responsible for adopting it is valuable work.

The foundations are starting to come together

Back in May, after Drupal Dev Days in Athens, I wrote about an “Athena” moment for Drupal AI. The ambition was to bring useful capabilities together into an architecture that organisations could govern and trust.

Rotterdam made that direction more tangible. In his Driesnote, Dries showed progress across multilingual content, JavaScript, headless delivery and AI. Easier multilingual setup and multilingual Canvas support help organisations reach more people. React components and Canvas Headless open up more options for developers while preserving a visual authoring experience for editors.

I see these developments also as connected. Editors need usable tools. Developers need flexibility. Organisations need their content, permissions and processes to remain coherent as the ways of interacting with them change.

The Northmoor University AI demonstration made that practical. It showed content reviews, answers grounded in site content with sources, and an assistant preparing changes for human review. These are recognisable tasks for a digital team. The vision we had for the Athena release became real in the demo, everything came together. Also here Big thanks to Christoph from 1xinternet and Niels from Dropsolid.

A demonstration is a starting point. Each organisation still needs to decide which information is authoritative, who may access it and which actions require approval. Drupal gives us a foundation for that work. The implementation has to make those rules real.

Two awards, and the people behind them

Monday evening gave us another reason to celebrate. At the International Splash Awards, Dropsolid AI took both places in Government & Public Services: the winner with EU Careers by EPSO, and the runner-up with Pidpa.

Celebrating EPSO and Pidpa at the International Splash Awards. Photo shared in my LinkedIn post from 28 September.

I am proud of the teams and grateful to both customers for their trust. Thank you also to Antonella Picarella for joining us on stage and helping bring the EPSO story to the community.

What makes this meaningful to me is the work behind the awards. Public services deal with questions that matter to people. Helping someone find dependable information, and helping a team handle repetitive questions, is a worthwhile application of AI.

That is also the intention behind what I shared about Trusted Answers: giving people useful answers from an organisation's own information and creating more space for expert work. Recognition is welcome. The responsibility to keep improving those experiences continues after the ceremony.

Europe needs meaningful control over its technology

Digital sovereignty came up at the summit and in the Driesnote. I was glad to see it treated as a practical question about the future we are building.

The location of a server is part of that question. So are the ability to inspect the software, choose providers, move data and change a model without having to rebuild the entire experience.

Once AI becomes part of how an organisation answers questions and carries out work, those choices become consequential. The organisation needs to understand how its knowledge is used and who remains accountable for the result.

This connects directly to why we started Dropsolid. I have always believed that customers should be able to participate in, learn from and retain control over their digital platforms. AI makes that principle more relevant. It also asks more of us as partners: good architecture, clear boundaries and ongoing care.

We have to make the progress visible

Dries also spoke about the gap between what Drupal can do and what the market thinks it can do. I recognise that problem. A platform can evolve significantly while people continue to judge the version they encountered years ago.

Dries addressing the community during the Driesnote in Rotterdam. Photo: Karl Hepworth, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program recognises work that helps people discover and understand Drupal. Customer stories, demonstrations, tutorials and sharing other people's work all help build that understanding.

For me, that means being specific. Show the task. Explain the choices. Share what worked, what needed more effort and where human judgement remains necessary. That gives a prospective user something they can assess for themselves.

It is also why I keep sharing what we are doing. A useful example can travel further than a claim about how advanced a platform has become.

The next step is ours to build

Our Diamond sponsorship and our work in the Drupal AI Initiative come from the same conviction: the future of Drupal needs people and organisations willing to invest in it.

Contributing creates a valuable exchange. Customer work helps us understand which problems matter. Shared development gives more teams a stronger starting point. Those teams then bring their own experience back into the community.

That is what I want us to keep doing after Rotterdam. Help customers choose a useful first application. Support the people who build and maintain the foundations. Give credit to the work of others. Keep learning from what happens in practice.

Thank you to our customers, the Dropsolid team, the Drupal AI partners, the organisers, the volunteers and everyone who contributed to the week.

Munich helped me see a future in Drupal. In Rotterdam, I had the privilege of helping open its next chapter and see the transformation Drupal AI is bringing. I am looking forward to building it together the next decade.