Ulli Hinze
Sr. Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
Ulli Hinze is a Solutions Architect at AWS, where he helps software companies build cloud- and AI-native SaaS products. He optimizes for shipping fast, as the worst product is the one that never ships. In agentic AI he focuses on two things: context and retrieval engineering, because an agent is only as good as its context; and observability, because agent quality has to be measurable before it can be improved. Ulli has spent 13+ years architecting and engineering software across multiple industries and has spoken at conferences globally, including AWS re:Invent. He is dad to two small kids, so specializations outside work include airplanes that talk and competitive dishwasher loading.
Beyond SaaS: How software companies can thrive in the Autonomous AI era
Session
In a single week of February 2026, the software sector lost roughly a trillion dollars in market cap — not because a better competitor showed up, but because autonomous agents started dissolving the jobs traditionally done by SaaS vendors, and getting closer to the user while doing it. This session gives organization that builds software for a living a different mental model for the agentic era, and one diagnostic to run on their own business. We'll walk through the six surfaces where coding agents now decide whether your product gets used, then look at the new business models emerging on the horizon for autonomous AI — and the challenges that come with them, from security and distribution to monetization. We'll wrap with the emerging patterns of how the teams that build all of this are starting to look.