Madrona IA40 Summit 2026

Notes from the Madrona Intelligent Applications 40 (IA40) Summit 2026, a two-day gathering at the Four Seasons Hotel Seattle on September 29–30. The full program is on the IA40 Summit agenda. The stellar lineup of speakers:

Below are the sessions that interested me most, in the order they ran.

Agency in the Agentic Era: Building the Next Generation of Apps and Platforms

Keynote. Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents, and Platform, Microsoft, with Matt McIlwain, Managing Director, Madrona.

Harnessing the Value of Harnesses

Panel. Carlos Guestrin, Co-CEO, Noeri; Rahul Patil, CTO, Anthropic. Moderated by Raphaëlle d’Ornano, CEO & Founder, Decoding Discontinuity.

Betting on Agency

VC panel. Jamin Ball, Partner, Altimeter; Sabrina Albert, Partner, Madrona; Dan Grossman, VP, Business & Corporate Development, Amazon. Moderated by Dina Bass, Bloomberg.

When Models Go Rogue: Building AI Systems You Can Actually Trust

Fireside chat. Zico Kolter, Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Gray Swan, with Vivek Ramaswami, Partner, Madrona.

Verifying the Value of AI

Fireside. Carina Hong, Founder & CEO, Axiom, and Raphaëlle d’Ornano, CEO & Founder, Decoding Discontinuity.

The First Frontier: Software’s Agentic Rewrite

Panel. Eno Reyes, Co-founder & CTO, Factory; Taroon Mandhana, CTO, AI & Teamwork, Atlassian; Thomas Dohmke, Co-founder & CEO, Entire (former CEO of GitHub Inc.). Moderated by Ted Kummert, Venture Partner, Madrona.

The Future of Autonomous Systems

Keynote. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies, AWS, with Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona. Swami’s session on LinkedIn →

The summit wrapped up with closing remarks from Matt McIlwain.

Notable takeaways

• Harnesses = everything between goals, model capabilities, and end outcomes; capabilities are scaling rapidly, but outcome ambitions are also scaling
• The fundamental unlock for the agentic enterprise and agentic actions is no longer data, but high-quality context and continuous learning
• Headless agents, super agents, and horizontal tools will coexist in AI systems; the battle now is for customer engagement and the associated usage data
• We are moving along a spectrum of delegating authority: security, privacy, and accuracy are top of mind as we scale toward widespread agentic adoption
• ROI of AI is early for most end user customers, yet ROI feels inevitable based on the frontier adopters

Madrona published its official recap on October 7: Inside Madrona’s IA40 Summit: Harnesses, Context, and Trust →

A further recap followed on October 9: Highlights From the 2026 IA40 Summit: Harnessing the Value of AI →

Reflections

What I appreciated most was the breadth of the conversations: from agentic applications and software development to AI safety, verification, autonomous systems, and the infrastructure needed to make these systems genuinely useful and trustworthy. A great couple of days of learning, exchanging ideas, and thinking about what comes next for AI and software. Thank you to the Madrona Ventures team for putting together such a thoughtful gathering.