[AI Week] Software Factories: The Next Evolution of Software Development

AI coding agents have fundamentally changed how software is written, but the real opportunity is much bigger than making individual developers more productive. Software factories represent the next evolution: systems of specialized AI agents that work together to plan, design, architect, build, test, review, and deploy software. Rather than using AI to accelerate individual coding tasks, software factories automate entire development workflows. In this talk, John Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Actual AI, explores how software factories work, what makes them different from today's AI coding assistants, and why they have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost and time required to build software. Drawing on practical experience building and teaching software factories, John will examine what these systems can do today, where they still struggle, and how engineering organizations can begin adopting them. The central question is no longer just how we make developers more productive with AI, but how we build software development systems that continuously produce reliable, maintainable software with increasingly less human intervention. Speaker Bio John Kennedy, Founder & CEO, Actual AI John Kennedy is the Founder and CEO of Actual AI, a Seattle-based company building AI-native engineering management and governance tools for software development.