Drupal Developer Days Leuven

They say a picture tells a thousand words. This one from the Drupal CMS Q&A with Dries at Drupal Dev Days this week says it all. Spirits in the Drupal community are at an all time high, and with good reason.

Drupal Developer Days is highly significant event in the Drupal calendar. It serves as a central point for active contribution, particularly in advancing core development and driving key initiatives forwards. This week ten of our most active contributors joined the community to make progress towards key objectives in time for DrupalCon Vienna.

Key moments from this week

With high momentum in progress towards many strategic initiatives in Drupal, it was a stretch to be in all the places across the event. Fortunately, with so many of the team attending, 1xINTERNET had it covered. Here's a summary of our key highlights.

Experience Builder steals the show from AI

Without doubt, one of the sessions drawing the most attention and excitement was the demonstration of progress with Experience Builder.

Drupal Experience Builder is an upcoming open-source tool that simplifies building and managing Drupal websites. It enables marketers, editors, and non-technical users to design and manage content-rich sites directly in the browser, with minimal coding required.

Dries demonstrated Experience Builder at DrupalCon Atlanta. This week Bálint Kléri and Wim Leers showcased progress achieved since then towards stable release of Drupal CMS Experience Builder (in October 2025). The results are breath taking.

In the space of 30 minutes Kléri and Leers demonstrated in a commanding manner that Drupal's editorial experience is now equal if not better than anything else on the market. 

These groundbreaking features define a new higher bar in web content management and as can be seen below, every member of the audience was in awe.

Experience Builder: Transforming Drupal for Its Next Chapter (presentation)

Download and try Experience Builder

Building Agents with code or no-code or low-code

A strategic objective for Drupal CMS is to democratise access to advanced AI capabilities through no-code or low-code approaches.

Marcus Johansson demonstrated new features that are nearing production readiness, further cementing Drupal’s position as the leading AI-powered CMS, even when compared to proprietary solutions.

During his live demonstration, we saw just how straightforward it is with new tools to configure multiple AI agents through a browser interface, triggering complex, multi-step tasks.

Drupal is amongst the first to integrate to the Model Context Protocol, often referred to as a "USB-C port" for AI applications, opening AI integration to systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Slack, Microsoft Teams the list is vast and growing quickly.

Using the Drupal MCP client, Marcus quickly built a prototype that triggered a sequence of actions - culminating in the website initiating a phone call. Dries Buytaert explains how it was done in a companion post. 

Whilst these features are still in development, the tangible progress is jaw dropping and opens Drupal to countless new use cases.

If you are looking for inspiration in how to use AI for your projects, the Workflows of AI site showcases a plethora of AI proof of concepts, all built with Drupal.

Jamie went on to explain how American International Group, Inc, (AIG), a global insurance organisation, have gone live with an AI based underwriting process developed by proprietary vendor Palantir.

I cannot think of an older, slower less innovative company than AIG the most stuffiest of enterprise … but they’ve done it. 

Underwriting normally involves a team of experts and takes 3 weeks long. AIG's new AI based underwriting completes the gets answers in 3 hours. The competition could be doomed.

There no more regulated industries, with so hoops to jump through. It’s wild that this has been passed by regulators. It signals the start of an AI gold rush the more people hear about it.

AI is particularly well suited to use cases where processes are expensive, time consuming and require specialist skills. AI can help to generate value faster.

Drupal AI Orchestration, a match made in heaven

Palantir's  semantic models allow data from different sources to be combined, contextualised, and acted upon.

Drupal as an orchestration framework is a match made in heaven. Unlike Palantir, which is a black box proprietary solution, Drupal offers transparency-you know what’s under the hood.

It is entirely conceivable that Drupal could serve as an orchestration platform for deploying similar solutions using a no-code or low-code approach.

Harnessing technology for greater good

Thijs Suijten gave a thought-provoking keynote highlighting the mission of Hack the Planet, a non-profit initiative he co-founded within the Dutch technology company Q42.

Hack the Planet harnesses engineering and digital innovation to tackle urgent global issues. Their work delivers practical solutions in areas such as environmental conservation, humanitarian support, and social justice.

Thijs drew our attention to his experience that the best ideas don't come when you are bound to a desk.

The best ideas don't come when you are bound to a desk. Every time we go out we come back with 10 ideas perfectly honed to the user context

When this thinking is applied to software and systems design, it highlights the importance of taking an outside-in approach, getting into the user context and understanding the problem that needs to be solved.

At Drupal Dev Days Suijten highlighted the value of design in the field through The Repeller, shown below. It was developed in response to Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC), a growing issue where human and elephant populations increasingly come into contact - often resulting in crop loss, property damage, and risk to both human and animal life. 

The Repeller employs digital cameras integrated with AI technology to detect the presence of elephants in real time. Upon identification, the system emits a loud sound intended to gently deter the animal and reduce the likelihood of confrontation.

Rather than designing at base, the solution was created and adapted according to the environment, performance on site and iterated. This rapidly shortened time to deployment and guaranteed effectiveness.

Vienna calling

In less than six months, we will gather once again in Vienna for DrupalCon. By that time, Drupal CMS 2.0 will have been released, featuring a stable version of Experience Builder and notable advancements in Drupal AI.

It is an exciting time to be working with Drupal and we returned home energised and inspired. See you in Vienna!