Its Up To Java Developers to Fix Enterprise AI
Enterprise AI is failing. The majority of enterprise Gen AI initiatives stall or fail to deliver expected value. Why? Because too many organizations have been treating AI as something alien to their existing systems, to be built by separate teams, using tools designed by people who don’t understand or care about their requirements.
It’s time for a course correction, bringing the Java community’s proven application development skills to bear. The JVM runs many of the world’s critical applications, and is ideally placed to AI enable them.
In this keynote, Rod Johnson will outline approaches for building agentic applications that work in production. These patterns share common themes: integration with what already works, structure where possible in place of text, and leveraging patterns and practices that work, like DDD and unit testing.
Rod will discuss topics including:
- Structured Agent Interactions: Moving beyond strings to type-safe, testable agent code
- Domain-anchored Agents: Why your existing domain model is your greatest AI asset, not an obstacle to work around. DICE (Domain Integrated Context Engineering) is the missing piece of context engineering
- The superpower of tool methods on domain objects: Minimizing context, maximizing precision, and keeping sensitive data out of LLM calls
- Agentic RAG: Combining retrieval with domain intelligence for applications that reason over business data and link customer interactions with existing entities.
Java developers are uniquely positioned to turn the failure of enterprise Gen AI into success. The patterns and infrastructure we’ve built and modern Java frameworks facilitate are exactly what enterprise AI needs to succeed. The Embabel agent framework demonstrates that, far from playing catchup, the JVM can leapfrog other platforms.
The Python-first era of AI agents was a prototype phase. Production belongs to the JVM. Spring made enterprise Java work in the 2000s and can underpin making enterprise AI work in the 2020s.
