pubX sponsored the Happy Hour at Prebid DevCon Germany, and our Director of Engineering, Lukasz Szczesiak, took to the stage as part of the agenda. Held 22 September in Cologne, DevCon is Prebid.org’s developer-first event, built around technical talks, live demos and open-source collaboration, bringing together developers, contributors and engineers from across the programmatic stack.

Why we backed DevCon

The agentic shift reshaping advertising isn’t only a commercial or strategic story, it’s an engineering one. As decision-making moves to machine scale, the practical, technical questions become just as urgent as the industry ones: how do you build agents that can be trusted with real infrastructure? What does reliable, observable, API-first agent design actually look like in practice?

These are exactly the conversations DevCon is built for.

What Lukasz covered

Lukasz shared real-world lessons on building agentic “thinking” bots that can reason and coordinate across multiple tools – right down to the trust layer that structurally empowers them to make, approve, or reject decisions with confidence. Practical over theoretical, the kind of detail that only comes from building these systems yourself.

It’s a natural extension of the API/MCP-first, skill-first, protocol-first philosophy we’ve been championing at pubX: agents work best when you treat them like a co-worker not just a tool call, and when they’re given clear, well-structured, still-based workflows to operate within — whether that agent is negotiating a media deal or reviewing a pull request.

pubX has been an active part of the Prebid community for years — as a top-ranked Prebid analytics adapter, and through previous active participation at Prebid Ascent and Prebid Summit in London, Cologne and New York. DevCon extended that relationship further, into the developer community building the agentic infrastructure this next phase of advertising runs on.

Behind the bar

Once the sessions wrapped, pubX hosted the Happy Hour – catching up with many of the DevCon community over a drink after a full day of talks. 🍻

Thanks to Prebid for having us.