Stop 67. Singapore Closes the Year.

This week I'm packing for AgentCon Singapore. For once, my packing agent can relax: nobody forgets a jacket on the way to Singapore.

On Thursday, November 5, the last AgentCon of the year takes place at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). It closes out a number I still find hard to believe: 67 AgentCons around the world. Before I get on the plane, I want to write down what that number means to me, and why I'm so happy this one is in Singapore.

What 67 actually means

On a slide, 67 is just a number. In real life, it's 67 times that a local community decided to do something difficult. Find a venue. Find speakers. Convince people to give up a whole day. Make sure there's coffee in the morning and a working Wi-Fi password in the afternoon. And then open the doors to a room full of developers who want to build AI agents together.

Every one of those days was free to attend. Almost every one was run by people from that city, with their own speakers and their own voice. Singapore is no exception: the day is organized by our local chapter, Global AI Singapore, together with AvePoint as our organizing partner. I've written before that a global community is an enablement machine, and that the best way to go where the developers are is to help the people who are already there. AgentCon is that idea, 67 times over.

What a year of AgentCon taught me

I've written a lot about this year's lessons already, so here are just the three that keep coming back.

The room still matters. Every talk is available online, often for free, and every answer is a question to a chat window away. The rooms filled up anyway. People don't come for information. They come for each other.

Building beats watching. The sessions people remember are the ones where they built something next to someone else, not the ones where they watched a perfect demo.

Local voices carry further. A speaker from the city itself, who will still be at the next meetup, builds more trust than any visitor who flies out the next morning. Myself included.

Why I'm excited about Singapore

Singapore is one of the busiest tech hubs in Asia, with a developer scene that's growing fast around AI. Ending the year there feels right, and the program shows it: three rooms, more than 20 speakers, and a full day of talks and hands-on workshops on building, measuring and securing agents.

I have the honor of opening the day with the keynote, Agents of Tomorrow: Building the Next Generation of Intelligence. And I'm looking forward to the people even more than the stage.

Dux. Right after my keynote, Dux Raymond Sy, Chief Transformation Officer at AvePoint, takes the stage with The AI Trust Gap: Who Answers When Agents Act? That might be the most important question of this whole year of agents, and there's nobody I'd rather hand the microphone to. With AvePoint as organizing partner for Singapore, this day is as much Dux's as it is the local chapter's, and closing the year together means a lot.

Our partners, Neo4j and Solace. I've written that the stage at a community event is not for sale, and that the best thing a company can do is send the people who actually build the product. That's exactly what both partners are doing in Singapore.

From Neo4j, Vasundhara Shukla explains why AI agents love knowledge graphs: structured knowledge that agents can reason over, instead of guessing. From Solace, Ari Hermawan talks about building agents that stay steady, and Sahaj Sharma runs a hands-on workshop on Solace Agent Mesh, where you build a multi-agent travel planner yourself. That's what good partnership looks like: real depth, real code, and experts in the room who can answer the second question. Partners like them are also why we can keep every AgentCon free.

See you there

AgentCon Singapore is on Thursday, November 5, from 08:30 to 17:00, at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. You'll find the full schedule and registration at globalai.community/e/awgteae7.

If you're there, come say hi. Bring your questions, bring your laptop, and bring the thing you're stuck on. That's what the day is for.

Sixty-seven times this year, a community opened its doors. Let's make the last one count.