REST APIs were designed for human-built clients that know exactly what URL to call. AI agents are different — they reason, plan, and decide what data they need at runtime. That mismatch is quietly becoming one of the biggest friction points in enterprise AI adoption.

In this session, we explore why GraphQL, paired with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), is uniquely positioned to become the standard interface layer for agentic systems. You'll learn how GraphQL's strong typing and introspection eliminate the hallucination risk of ambiguous REST contracts, how its precise data retrieval model solves the over-fetching and under-fetching problems that make LLM tool calls expensive and unpredictable, and how MCP builds on top of this to give AI agents a standardised, self-describing surface to discover and invoke capabilities — without custom glue code per integration.

Walk away with a clear mental model of the GraphQL-MCP stack, a practical pattern for evolving existing REST endpoints into agent-ready GraphQL APIs, and real examples of AI agents successfully navigating complex multi-step queries using schema-declared tools.

Whether you're an API architect, a backend engineer, or a developer building your first AI agent, this session gives you the vocabulary and the blueprint to make your APIs first-class citizens in the agentic world.

In this talk, we're unpacking GraphQL Fusion, a new approach that makes building distributed GraphQL APIs easier. We'll explore how this approach lets your teams work independently by owning different parts of the company's graph and cover how you can reshape subgraphs to follow your company's rules. Come learn about this powerful tool that brings efficiency and customization to your GraphQL operations.

Tim Couper, Chief Architect at 1EdTech, will explore how emerging movements in education technology are intersecting with AI. He’ll discuss how advances in interoperability and AI are driving the demand for dynamic schema discovery and smarter data ecosystems for learning.

Join Dan from rconnect.tech as he introduces GQLPT, a npm library that transforms plain text into GraphQL queries. Learn how to set up a TypeScript instance of GQLPT and replace your existing GraphQL calls with simple plain text queries. Dan will also dive into advanced topics, showing you how to take GQLPT to production using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and vectorized embeddings. This talk is perfect for developers looking to streamline their GraphQL workflow and leverage AI for more efficient API interactions.