CollabDays Netherlands 2026

13/06/2026, Van der Valk Hotel, Vianen
Vianen, Netherlands

Developing AI Agents in Practice

What are AI agents *actually* good for? Back in the days, they told us that everything needs to be (in) SharePoint, nowadays they teach us that everything must be AI. In this architecture and development session, I'll cut through the hype and show you what agent is, and what it isn't, where it is ok to use AI within the process, and where you should better leave it alone. I'll take you through our journey implementing Microsoft Agent Framework and various LLMs to develop agents as a part of our product. There will be no theoretical hand-waving - we'll dive deep into practical scenarios where agents were good: understanding context and making one certain type of decisions decisions. And where we have been considering using them, but we colectivelly decided it was a stupid decision and we were proven right :) We will go through concrete examples from various domains, and explain which agents have we built and why: * Context-aware recommendation systems * Context-aware personalization * Products and modules which we completely "restarted" because of AI I'll cover: * The tech stack we chose and why (and why we are annoyed by Microsoft for killing Semantic Kernel) * Architecture and abstraction patterns for building maintainable agent systems * When to use agents vs. traditional approaches * Live coding examples We will go through the difference between "AI agents" as a buzzword and agents as practical problem-solvers and possibility-openers. Whether you're writing code, designing systems, or evaluating AI solutions for your organization, this session, or a discussion over a cold Dutch (or even better, Belgian!) beer, might help you to make the right decisions.