OCTO Technology’s Duck Conf returns on March 24, 2026 in Paris at the Pavillon Chesnaie du Roy. This is a fully in-person conference designed for architects, CTOs, developers, and CIOs managing under pressure: technical debt, a monolith that is wearing out, underused cloud investments, and now generative or agentic AI to integrate without breaking the system.
With around 500 attendees, 2 tracks, 15 speakers, and 4 hands-on workshops, the event feels less like a buzzword showcase and more like a real-world lab. The promise is clear: practical architecture, concrete modernization, and business-driven trade-offs.
The SME Opportunity: Learn Fast, Avoid the Wrong Turns
For an SME or Mid-Market Enterprise, the main value of an event like this is simple: save time on critical decisions. When you are weighing whether to rebuild a fragile legacy application, break apart a monolith, move to Kubernetes, or experiment with AI agents, every bad decision can mean months of delay and significant cost.
Duck Conf delivers on several useful fronts:
- Production-grade feedback: not polished slides made to impress, but lessons from architects who have already felt the impact in real operations.
- Hands-on workshops: especially on AI-assisted reverse engineering and technical debt reduction.
- Highly relevant topics: open source, microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, digital sustainability, legacy modernization, and real-world uses of generative AI.
- Smart networking: connect with peers facing the same constraints as you, without the usual marketing gloss.
The real ROI for an IT leadership team is not “seeing cool tech.” It is coming back with a sharper decision-making framework to prioritize the right initiatives and avoid trend-chasing that burns budget without creating value.
The Caution: Useful, But Not Magic
That said, Duck Conf remains a highly technical event. If your teams do not work on architecture, operations, technical governance, or application modernization, the value may be limited. This is not a mainstream conference about “AI for everyone.”
Another point: the total cost goes beyond the ticket. Pricing starts at €500 per attendee, and you still need to factor in travel, hotel costs in Paris, and, most importantly, time away from the business. There is also the classic risk: without internal sponsorship and a clear action plan afterward, the event ends up in the “good idea forgotten six months later” category.
The fully in-person format also reflects a deliberate choice: if you do not attend, there is no replay to catch up later.
Conclusion & Cohesium Support
Duck Conf 2026 can be highly valuable for an SME looking to structure its IT modernization with clarity, especially if it wants to understand how AI agents, cloud, and technical debt really fit together in the field. But as with most architecture initiatives, the event only matters if you turn the ideas into a roadmap.
Rather than improvise, Cohesium AI can provide a post-Duck Conf Strategic Audit to validate your AI agent integration strategy, define the governance framework, and then bootstrap a proof of concept around a concrete business use case. Contact us