How Coupa DevCon Democratizes AI Agent Building

Hello, everybody. We are still at Coupa Inspire 2026. Techstrong TV is here, and we are having great conversations, fantastic conversations, with a lot of Coupa partners, Coupa execs.

And there's one in particular, an event that I wanted to go to and if I could have covered, is their very first DevCon, Coupa DevCon. And here with us today is Chris Mayer. Chris is the vice president of architecture.

He was a keynote speaker, and he had a lot to do with making this first-ever DevCon happen. Chris, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me.

Yes. So what happened? I've heard about robots.

I know it's been hands-on for people to come in and build agents. So where do you want to start? Yeah.

Let's just talk about DevCon. DevCon was our first ever Coupa DevCon developer conference- Nice ... where we brought together more than 300 people from the Coupa community, builders, engineers, but also not just the IT professionals, but also regular users who are just looking for ways to make their workflow and their daily job easier and smoother.

Oh, that's fantastic. So how did it go? When you were planning it, what was the buzz around it?

Was it sold out? Did you have to- Yeah ... push some people?

Wow, okay. So there you go. Yeah.

So when we came up with the idea for DevCon, so it was announced a year ago. Salva went on stage for his keynote at last year's Inspire- Oh, okay ... 2025.

I was sitting front row. " Because we hadn't heard about it. So this all came together very recently.

But- Awesome, yes ... after he announced it, behind the scenes, we kicked into high gear and started coming up with figuring out what would draw the makers and builders in our community there. And we knew that for them, the most important thing was being hands-on, really getting their hands on our new innovation, our new product, the agents, and delivering real value.

So that's where we started. So how many agents you think were built? I'm hearing over 300.

Walk us through how that, the whole from the beginning to the end of the event. Walk us through, for people like us who didn't get to go. Yeah.

Give us a scenario. Yeah, no. So we had over 300 attendees, and everyone got a chance to be hands-on with our newly released Agent Studio capabilities.

Yes. And with Agent Studio, we make it super easy to build an agent. Mm-hmm.

So if you're an expert, you can go in and give detailed prompts and instructions for the agent. But if you're not an expert, you can actually have another agent help you build that agent. And this is with Coupa Navi?

This is with Coupa Navi. And it's no code. It's no code.

So it really democratizes the experience. Yeah. So anybody, not just the engineers, not just the builders, but anybody who has a problem to solve can go in and create an agent.

Mm-hmm. And so for 300 people got to get hands-on with our new innovations. It was great to see, because with a lot of software we build, it takes a while to get into our customers' hands- Mm-hmm ...

and see that value. Here, day one, we have people hands-on getting to use it and- Yep ... building real agents.

Oh, that's fantastic. And then you were keynote speaker along with Salva- That's right ... and a few other people.

How'd that experience go? Have you ever been a keynote speaker in the past? I have not spoken at Inspire before.

Wow. So that was an honor. Yeah.

But it was fantastic for me, because I've been VP of architecture at Coupa for more than 10 years. So- Oh, fantastic ... I've got to work with teams in pretty much every part of the product, building out our platform, building out our innovations.

And so getting to talk about that, talk a little bit about our history, how we built to all the innovations that Salva and Dennis and others presented on stage. Yes. That was a real honor.

Fantastic. And you had a guest speaker, Melissa Valentine, and she's from Stanford? She's from Stanford, yeah.

She's a tenured professor, and she's in one of the research labs there. And she brought a great, perfect perspective for us because- Oh, nice ... it really tied into our whole message of how agents are transforming the workforce- Mm-hmm ...

and changing the nature of work and how you engage with your work. And she really elevated it to what the trends in the whole industry and that are impacting everybody beyond Coupa. Yeah.

So the attendees really enjoyed what she had to say. That's fantastic. So let's talk about competition and prizes.

Tell us about these robots, because I want to hear more. Yeah, absolutely. So we had some intense competition, I think.

Intense. So we had some prizes. So we had an AI-powered robot, which I think brought in some great killer instinct from our attendees.

Mm-hmm. Really drove some intense competition. And we had some winners who got to take home this fully automated robot that they can also program with AI.

Mm-hmm. And I think beyond that, though, they got to build some agents that they can go back and take into production right away. So the robot's great.

The robot's going to help them. But I think day in and day out, the agents that they build, the expertise that they get, that's really what they're going to take back with them. That's fantastic.

What was the best prize in your or the people that did attend? What was the best prize that people were excited about, other than the robot? So the robot was our main prize, and I think that was- Yeah ...

for especially the more techie, nerdy people like me. Okay, of course. Yeah.

That was pretty exciting. I was excluded as an employee. I wish I could have competed and gotten a robot also, but- ...

no, people were pretty excited about that. That's fantastic. Anything you want to add about the competition, or, well, the actual event and the competition that we haven't described yet?

No, I think just seeing- Salva ... 300 people, the excitement in the room, the energy, I think it was beyond... We always have a lot of excitement at Inspire, but- Yeah ...

for me, it was really next level. And just engaging with our customers, engaging with our users, and seeing that they can deliver value so quickly and get their hands on our product, really energizing. So what are you going to do differently for DevCon 2027?

Ooh. I think bigger, better. Bigger and better.

We- What does that mean, bigger and better? More people? More people.

More robots? So we worried in the beginning that we're going to be able to sell enough tickets, but- Oh, okay ... but we sold out.

And the last couple weeks, we had people coming, all sorts of friends asking for favors if they can attend. Event ended up being standing room only. So we know next year we need to go big.

So bigger, better, more innovation, more Coupa. Yeah. It sounds right to me.

Go big or go home. Is that what we're saying? Absolutely.

Chris, thank you so much for taking the time. This is awesome. I'm sorry I missed it because I love DevCon events.

It's always great to see people build. And this is just fantastic. We will be right back at Coupa Inspire.

Techstrong TV, and more to come. Stay tuned.