At AGNTCon Europe, ensuring AI agents don’t kill us all

At this past week’s AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026 conference in Amsterdam, the buzz around agentic artificial intelligence was palpable – but nobody was particularly worried that AI was going to kill us all.

The frontier model vendors – none of which appeared on the show floor – may have spent the week frantically positioning their growth challenges as global magnanimity, but for the startups touting their wares in the exhibit hall, the common theme was agentic AI getting down to business.

Though the pace of innovation in the emerging agentic AI marketplace is certainly outrunning the pace of adoption, there were plenty of bona fide paying customer stories as well.

That being said, this market is unquestionably nascent. Rapid innovation drives new business models on a weekly basis, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the real products from the hand-waving.

I spoke with most of the exhibitors and settled on the following seven companies as representative of the turbulent balance between customer traction and rapid innovation:

Managing risk: Governance as the starting point for agentic AI

Why do I discount the wild proclamations that AI will grow out of control? Because of all the effort and innovation going into controlling it.