Title: The Age of Coding Agents: How AI is Rewriting the Way We Build Software
Speaker: Marco António Silva (Microsoft – Sr Global Black Belt – Solution Engineer – EMEA)
Date: May 29, 2026, 14h
Where: C6.1.25
Abstract: We are living through the most profound shift in software development since the invention of version control. AI is no longer your autocomplete — it is your coding agent. It plans, executes, reviews, and ships code autonomously. The question is no longer “should we use AI?” but “how do we build an engineering culture that harnesses agents at scale?”
In this keynote, Marco Antonio Silva — Microsoft Global Black Belt and field engineer who runs agentic development programs with Fortune 500 enterprises — takes you on a live journey through the three pillars of the Coding Agent revolution:
GHCP Modernization CLI — Watch a legacy codebase get analysed, planned, and refactored by an agent in minutes. Real code. Real enterprise context. The same workflow being used today to modernize hundreds of applications at scale.
Squad — Meet the next evolution: multi-agent teams that collaborate the way engineers do. Squad brings structured agentic ceremonies (planning, review, merge gates) to your repository, transforming a single AI into an always-on engineering crew.
Spec2Cloud — See how a simple specification becomes a cloud-native application. Spec2Cloud closes the loop between intent and implementation, bridging the gap from design to deployed service with agents doing the heavy lifting.
This is not a future vision. Every demo in this keynote runs live. Every pattern shown is in production at enterprise customers today. You will leave with a concrete mental model for how agents change the software lifecycle — and what you need to do next week to get ahead of this shift.
✅ Understand the three layers of the Coding Agent revolution
✅ See real agents modernize, build, and deploy code live on stage
✅ Walk away with an actionable adoption roadmap for your team
Short Bio: Marco Antonio Silva is a Senior Solution Engineer in the Global Black Belt team in EMEA, focussed on the Application Modernization space. This is a highly specialized team of people that help customers adopt cutting edge technologies, practices and Frameworks, while at the same time bringing important structured feedback directly from the field to Engineering teams on what needs to change in products to match customer’s real need. Previously, Marco Antonio Silva was the National Innovation Officer for Microsoft Portugal, responsible for helping companies grow and accelerate the innovation impact that we can have in Portugal, having worked in Tech innovation for many years. Marco Antonio Silva was also a Senior Cloud Solution Architect with many years of experience in the Telco Industry. As a Cloud Solution Architect his work was to challenge my customers with new ideas and new ways for them to use cloud technologies, and he loves it.
Marco Antonio Silva got this Engineering Degree in Computer Engineering from FEUP, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics, which are all areas he loves. Marco Antonio Silva is part of the AI Ambassador team at Microsoft so he is tasked with the mission of empowering people to leverage AI more and achieve more with it. He is a professional speaker for many years, and he teaches some AI/ML classes at ISEG in Lisbon. He also hosts and founder of the “AI Portugal Podcast”, the “The Innovation Office Webshow” and the “DICE Podcast”, and the blog “Tech Alchemy”.