Codegarden 2026: Giriraj Digital's Wrap & Takeaways

Our wrap-up of Codegarden 2026. From sharing India's Umbraco education story on stage, to the announcements that will shape the next three years. Here's what actually mattered.

Codegarden 2026 is done, the badges are in the drawer, and we are back in Ahmedabad with full notebooks and a lot to think about. For over twenty years, Umbraco's flagship conference in Copenhagen has been where the community comes together to learn, connect, and glimpse where the platform is heading and this year, on June 10–11, it felt like a genuine turning point.

If we had to sum up Codegarden 2026 in a single word, it would be AI. Not AI as a roadmap teaser or a someday-maybe, but AI as something the community is building with right now, in production. But the thing we loved most is that even as the platform grows up, it hasn't lost the community-led spirit that made Umbraco different in the first place. Here is our honest wrap-up including a moment we are specially proud of and the takeaways we think actually matter for the teams we build for.

A moment we won't forget: India's Umbraco story on stage

We will start with the personal part. This year, our founder & CEO Nikhil Prajapati took the stage to share the impact of Umbraco education in India, The story of what happens when you deliberately grow a developer community from the ground up in a country with one of the largest .NET talent pools in the world.

It is a story we care about deeply. Through the India Umbraco Education Program, we have watched students go from their very first "Hello Umbraco" to shipping on live client projects and earning certifications and we have seen the program begin to find its way into institutional curriculum. Standing on the Codegarden stage to tell that story, to a global community that has given us so much, was a genuine honor. The response reminded us why this work matters: Umbraco's future is global, and India has an enormous part to play in it.

Sharing that story wasn't a victory lap. It was an invitation to keep building the ecosystem, together.

Two MVPs under one roof

Codegarden is also where Umbraco recognizes its MVPs, the Most Valuable Professionals who give back to the community through packages, documentation, mentoring, talks, and leadership. This year, the MVP moment was a special one for us, twice over.

First, our founder Nikhil Prajapati was awarded Umbraco MVP for the third time. Three years of recognition isn't about any single contribution it reflects a sustained commitment to the community, from speaking and organizing to building the India Umbraco Education Program. We are proud, but not surprised: this is simply who Nikhil is.

And then the news we are most excited to share: Asha Chaudhary has been awarded Umbraco MVP for the first time a brand-new MVP, and very much home-grown. Asha's contribution to the community, from the Umbraco Meetups & Education programs to hands-on knowledge sharing, has been building for a while, and to see it recognized on the Codegarden stage was a genuine highlight of our week. Congratulations, Asha this one is thoroughly earned.

That means Giriraj Digital now has two Umbraco MVPs in-house. For our clients, that's not a badge on a wall; it means the people shaping your architecture are the same people helping shape the platform itself. For our team, it's proof of something we believe deeply: that world-class Umbraco talent can absolutely be grown in India. That's the whole thesis of the education program and here it is, walking across the Codegarden stage.

Takeaway 1: Umbraco.AI grew up from vision to production

Now to what we learned. The clearest message across the keynotes hosted by Emma Burstow and Mats Persson, with Filip Bech-Larsen on the product side was that Umbraco.AI has matured from a vision into something you can ship today.

When AI in Umbraco was first announced, it was a foundation and a promise: stay in control of which model you use, how it behaves, and what it's allowed to touch. At Codegarden 2026, that promise was clearly delivered with HQ-maintained features like property prompts and a Copilot living right inside the backoffice, and the AI packages moving onto the same version line as the platform going forward. The governance-first, vendor-neutral approach we have believed in is now real, production software. For anyone who has been waiting to see whether Umbraco's AI story was substance or slideware, Codegarden answered the question: it's substance.

Takeaway 2: The MCP Server was the standout AI that acts

If one announcement stole the show for the developers in the room, it was the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server. The reason is simple and profound: it turns AI from a helper that suggests into something that can act within your CMS.

That’s a significant shift. We saw live demos of AI agents building complete Umbraco websites including the homepage, blog, navigation, and sitemap largely on their own using the MCP Server, guided by modular skill files. What really stood out was the built-in "decision required" checkpoints before any destructive action could be taken. That’s the philosophy in action: giving AI agents the capability to do meaningful work while ensuring humans stay in control of critical decisions. It’s exactly the balance we’ve been talking about, and seeing it demonstrated live made the concept much more tangible.

This feels like the foundation of the agentic era for Umbraco and the best part is, it’s not just a vision for the future. It’s something teams can start using today.

Takeaway 3: Automate, A whole new product for the workflow

Codegarden loves a surprise, and this year it was a brand-new product: Umbraco Automate. Free, open source, and available in beta from the conference, Automate is an event-driven automation engine think triggers, actions, and control flow that lets you wire up workflows inside your own infrastructure.

Paired with AI, this is powerful: a change in your content can trigger a flow, a flow can call an AI action, and an AI agent can even call a flow as a tool all with approval steps where they matter. For the enterprise teams we work with, this is the piece that turns "AI can write things" into "AI can help run things," safely. We have already started mapping where Automate fits into our clients' content operations.

Takeaway 4: Making Composable Integrations Simple

The other significant product story was Umbraco Compose, aimed at a problem every enterprise architect knows well: the tangle of integrations that builds up when you are pulling data from a CMS, a PIM, a CRM, and an ERP. Compose orchestrates that data and makes it available through a single headless API reducing the integration spaghetti, and making structured data available not just to websites and apps, but to feeds and AI tools too.

That last part is the quiet headline. Making your enterprise data cleanly available to agentic AI is exactly the frontier we've been focused on, and Compose is Umbraco leaning directly into it. For organizations wrestling with complex digital ecosystems, it's a meaningful step.

Takeaway 5: Growing up, without losing the community

Here is what impressed us most about the tone of Codegarden 2026: Umbraco is maturing into a platform that businesses can trust ISO 27001 certification, a 100% SLA commitment on Cloud, strong independent reviews without losing the community that has shaped it for two decades.

You could feel both truths in the room. The enterprise signals were front and center for the decision-makers. But so was the community heart: a record number of MVPs recognized on stage, a sold-out MVP Summit bringing around a hundred contributors together, and the Umbraco Awards celebrating the best work in the ecosystem. That combination enterprise-grade trust and genuine community warmth is rare in technology, and it's a big part of why we have built our business on Umbraco.

Takeaway 6: Migration was everywhere and the framing changed

With Umbraco 13 reaching End of Life in December 2026, migration was, unsurprisingly, a recurring theme and one line from the migration sessions stuck with us: you don't just upgrade to v17, you migrate to it. The modern approach favors starting a clean v17 project and bringing content and code across in a structured way, using the improved migration tooling.

This matched exactly what we have been telling clients: treat the move to Umbraco 17 as an architectural moment, not a box-ticking upgrade. Start early, start with an audit, and use the deadline as an opportunity to land somewhere genuinely better. (We wrote a full, honest guide to the Umbraco 13 EOL and the path to 17 if you are planning yours.)

What it all means for the teams we build for

Step back, and the pieces fit together into one clear direction. Umbraco is becoming a platform for AI, not a CMS with AI bolted on with governed, vendor-neutral AI inside the Backoffice, an MCP Server that lets agents act, Automate to orchestrate workflows, and Compose to make enterprise data agent-ready. All of it layered, modular, optional, and under your control.

For the organizations we serve, that's genuinely good news. It means you can adopt AI on your terms, keep your data and governance intact, and modernize without betting the business on a single vendor's black box. It also means the work we've been focused on governed AI in Umbraco, connecting Umbraco to the wider AI ecosystem, grounding AI on enterprise systems, and getting clients cleanly onto Umbraco 17 is exactly where the platform is heading. Codegarden 2026 didn't change our direction. It confirmed it.

Why we keep showing up

We could watch the keynote recordings from Ahmedabad. We go anyway, every year, because Codegarden isn't really about the announcements those get written up within days. It's about the people. The hallway conversation that turns into a collaboration. The "oh, you're the one who built that" moment. The sense of belonging to something built in the open by people who genuinely like each other. That's the part you can't stream.

Bringing Codegarden home

Here's the thought we flew home with: the energy of Codegarden shouldn't only live in Copenhagen. It should live in India too. That's exactly why we are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the Umbraco India Festival 2026 India's first dedicated Umbraco community festival, coming to Kochi on August 28 & 29. Everything we saw and felt in Copenhagen is what we want to help bring to the Indian community on home soil.

If Codegarden inspired you and you are anywhere near India in August, come be part of the beginning of something. And if you would like to talk about what all of this AI, MCP, Automate, your v17 migration means for your own roadmap, we would love to. That's the kind of conversation we came home ready to have.

Thank you, Copenhagen.