PegaWorld 2025 (and my general thoughts on AI in 2025)

 

PegaWorld was a few days ago, and once again it was a huge blast. I'm fulfilling a promise to myself to actually write about it this year after neglecting to last year. I'll include a few things from 2024's edition though, as this year was sort of a sequel to the events from last year.

AI is here, and even low-code tools (which already do most of the code writing for you) are embracing it to the max. Last year, Pega announced several AI tools coming to their platform and this year followed up with the newest fad in AI - Agentic AI. For a platform that focuses on processes and workflows, I suppose this fits.

The conference itself

The conference itself, once you can get past some of the cheesy humor and jokes during the keynotes, is actually pretty fun. Alan Trefler's talk was a great introduction to the conference, and the point I took away from his talk was that you cannot stuff just any AI into a solution and think you will be okay - you need to use the right AI for the right problems. He compared it to attempting to use Chat GPT to help him with a chess puzzle. Chat GPT could not solve the problem, and instead gave Alan several incorrect/illegal moves in chess. As soon as Alan went to another AI that specialized in chess, it was solved in under two seconds. Thus begins a conversation about Pega having the right AI to solve workflow automation problems.

For the developer though, the keynotes are nice and some of the workshops and breakaway sessions can be really useful. But going to the innovation hub and seeing the new capabilities in action, talking with Pega engineers that built and specialize in that tool, and seeing how it can fit what we do on a day-to-day basis is the best part of the conference. I was able to meet some folks who are trying some new ideas in the Pega community, and I was able to learn about automated testing and network with people who have found creative ways to do it in Pega (a sticking point for our team right now).

I came back with several takeaways from the conference:

1. Become a bigger part of the Pega community
2. Pega Blueprint has changed quite a bit since being announced last year - I need to retrain myself on it and check out the latest updates.
3. I want to learn more about automating testing within Pega via code scripts and accessing JSON files via their API.
4. Pega Insights is a cool tool that we currently under utilize in our app at work - maybe we can use it?
5. There will (hopefully) be a small Pega event in my city later this year, so I look forward to going to that.
6. Pega recently released a whitepaper on AI in Operations, so I've downloaded that and plan to read it in the next week.

My AI thoughts in general

This conference both has me excited for the use of AI in application development and also terrified for the world we are creating. One of the Pega keynotes introduced their newest intern, Iris. Iris is a young girl who started working for Pega this year. She's fully remote, lives in Europe (Pega has a solid presence there, especially in the Netherlands), and has become a top contributor who has helped their employees with admin tasks - the type of stuff interns typically handle.

She's made mistakes on the job, as any person would. But to be frank, she's probably more of a professional and less green than I was when I was an intern. Iris loves her work, she loves where she lives (I believe it was an island with a northern lighthouse in the Netherlands?), and she enjoys working with her colleagues.

And as you've probably already guessed, Iris is also not real. She's completely made up - an artificially intelligent agent. 

On the one hand, this is cool. We've gotten to the point where computers can talk to us and be hyper-realistic. She has an employee picture, Pega employees refer to Iris with the she/her pronouns, and she has a personality that seems to make her human. 

But I cannot help but think we are starting to automate ourselves out of work. Right now, Agentic AI is being billed as the AI that will help you do the tasks you don't want to do. That's nice. But did Iris fill in a gap that would have been filled in the past by a real college intern? How about when Agentic AI gets to the point where it can do entry-level jobs - how long will it be when a CMO or VP of Finance decides that the entry level marketing or finance position can be handled by an Agentic AI instead of hiring a real human to do the same work? Because let's be real: computers have always been faster than humans at tasks that computers are capable of doing.

We're not far from this reality. Agentic AI, and AI in general, has made a lot of strides in the past few years since GPT 3 was announced to the world. And now, we have companies like Artisan in San Fransisco running marketing campaigns to stop hiring humans and instead hire their AI for massive cost savings. (Their marketing campaign is a sad one at that, purposefully created to make people angry and gather likes, clicks, impressions, etc. They should not have been rewarded for that, but alas here we are.)

All that to say, we may be coming to a point where we have to make some decisions with AI. How far are we willing to go to use it? Are we willing to let one AI handle the job of several people for the cost savings and speed? How many jobs are we willing to replace with AI if so? If all companies get on board with this, how quickly does it take us to automate 30% of the workforce out of a job? Will we make decisions today that harm the community at large over a long period of time in order to report good earnings and cost savings for the next quarterly investors call?

You can probably tell where I land on this. 

I was going to write about this in a separate post, but PegaWorld both last year and this year had me leaving with these apprehensions. I didn't come away from these keynotes fully excited for the future we are currently creating. I hope I'm wrong about it, I hope that companies still keep people employed and AI doesn't contribute to the death of several valuable industries and jobs. But after observing the past few years, I get ever so closer to feeling that we're all beginning to hand our jobs over to the control of just a few AI computers.

Making the most out of a meetup group in 2025

Yesterday I went to my first Programming meetup for 2025. A goal of mine has been to go to more of these this year. I went to one in 2024 and had a great time, then completely let it slide for the rest of the year. Not this year! There are a few meetup groups for software development who meet less than 30 minutes from my house, so I hope to visit both several times this year.

I saw a question on LinkedIn yesterday on a similar note which asks the question: "What are some actionable steps you can take to make the most out of attending a meetup?" That's a great question and one that I wanted to write a bit more in depth about. Going to a meetup group is essentially networking. It's very similar to conferences, but meetup groups are generally smaller. There may be conference-like presentations, or they may be more casual and people just show up, talk, and code, all while probably drinking some sort of coffee.

In my area, we have a Coffee and Code meetup which is perfect for me. It starts around 10am and goes until 1pm which is the perfect time for me and how I operate (I'm definitely more of a morning person). A little after 10am, we have a standup where we go around the circle and introduce ourselves, talk about any job openings we may know of, and what events are coming up that people can check out. Then we go back to our computers and either code, chat with others, or do little demos with folks on what we are working on and see what others are working on. I had a fantastic time meeting a gentleman who had built out a really neat event application for a non-profit's annual fundraiser. He showed me how he built the mobile app using XCode and Swift.

So what are actionable steps that I'd recommend to others when going to a coding meetup group? See below for a few pointers:

1. Go with a completely open mind. Who knows where your next connection will lead or who you will meet there. And this is also the first point I'm writing about, since I think all the other points below it can fit under this umbrella.
   
   
2. Don't think only about yourself. A mistake I made earlier in my career when "networking" was getting immediately benefits from networking and being in groups. For context, I was in sales and "social selling" had become all the rage. I'd show up to a group or connect with someone on LinkedIn and immediately try to get a sale without a relationship. Don't do this! People can sniff it out when you show up to a meetup only thinking about yourself and what you can "get." Instead, show up with an attitude of what you can GIVE to the group. Reaping rewards (new friends, a job opportunity, project collaborations) will happen with time.
   
   
3. Balance time working on coding projects and talking with people. I went to the meetup this past week for a little over 2 hours. I spent the first hour hacking away on my friend's website I'm building in React, and I spent the next hour or so talking to a few people seeing what they were doing.
   
   
4. Understand that you can contribute to the group no matter your coding experience. There were several people at our meeting this weekend who were JUST learning how to code. They knew some HTML, a little CSS, and were just getting their feet wet with JavaScript. But when they introduced themselves, they said they could help others with HTML and CSS. The point: even if you have just written your first line of HTML, you have something you can contribute or give to the group. Heck, just being there at the meetup and talking to others and listening to them explain their projects and passions is giving to the group. If you are new at coding, take some encouragement that you can contribute to a meetup group almost immediately.

I may revisit this post sometime in the future and add to it, but for now these are some basic points to remember with a meetup group. Don't be nervous or feel any pressure that you have to come away with something from the group. Just go and hang out with fellow programmers!