Thursday - Fleming - 0900 - Keynote - Opening Address - AIE Welcome

This session is the opening welcome address for AI Engineer Europe 2026, held in London. It features two speakers: Phil Hawksworth, serving as MC for the day, and Lia McBride, General Manager of AI Engineer.

Phil Hawksworth opens by welcoming attendees from across the globe — including representatives from Canada (Ottawa), Sri Lanka, and the Dominican Republic — underscoring the international draw of the event. He provides context for the day's structure: a series of keynote talks in the main room followed by a short break, then six specialized breakout tracks covering different areas of AI engineering. The event is framed as a knowledge-sharing and networking opportunity, with sponsors including Google DeepMind as the presenting sponsor, and platinum sponsors BrainTrust, WorkOS, and OpenAI.

Hawksworth reflects personally on his own evolution as a software engineer — beginning with video-switching technology for stock exchange traders, progressing through Ajax, web sockets, DOM scripting, and eventually to the current AI tooling wave. He admits to having been deeply cautious and reticent about adopting AI tools, concerned that his engineering craft was being eroded. However, he describes a growing shift: not the disappearance of craft, but its migration to a different layer of abstraction. He frames AI Engineer Europe 2026 as the ideal place to absorb these developments and advance that craft.

Lia McBride takes the stage to deliver the formal welcome on behalf of the AI Engineer organization. She highlights that this is the sixth AI Engineer conference overall and the first held in London or Europe. She cites a growth rate of 900% over three years, starting from a small debut event in San Francisco in 2023. In the prior year alone, the organization hosted almost 5,000 attendees across three events. The 2026 calendar also includes licensed partner events in Miami, Singapore, Melbourne, and Paris.

McBride reveals that on the morning of the conference, she and Swix (co-founder of AI Engineer / Latent Space) met at 10 Downing Street with Cal Beer Sohi, the UK's first-ever Chief AI Officer, a role created in January 2026. She characterizes the conversation as reflecting rapid acceleration in UK government AI ambition, and frames this as a significant career-defining opportunity for the engineers in the room. Her closing message to attendees is twofold: go deep on learning — ask questions and challenge ideas — and actively connect with peers, sponsors, and speakers, emphasizing that the community functions through openness, collaboration, and practicality.