UmbUK Fest 2026 and Umbraco Partner Summit

Last week the Brace Digital team packed up and headed down to London for two back-to-back days of Umbraco. Thursday was the Umbraco UK Partner Summit at Salisbury House in Moorgate, and Friday was the Umbraco UK Conference (UMBUK26) at CodeNode, the community-run event a lot of people still know as the Umbraco UK Festival which Brace Digital are a proud sponsor of.

Two very different days, but a lot of the same themes kept coming up. Here's what stood out for us.

Thursday: the Umbraco UK Partner Summit

The Partner Summit is a day for UK Umbraco partners only, run by Umbraco HQ. The morning was given over to product and business keynotes, the afternoon split into two tracks, and everyone came back together at the end for a fireside chat and Q&A. It's one of the few times in the year when a room full of agencies who are, on paper, competitors sit down and talk openly about what's working and what isn't. That openness is one of the things we like most about the UK Umbraco community.

AI is now the backdrop to everything

It wouldn't be a tech conference without AI being involved and AI wasn't a separate topic this year, it ran through almost every session. There were talks on marketing in the age of AI and on embedding AI into everyday agency work, and it came up again and again in the keynotes and in conversations over lunch.

Our take: the useful question has moved on from "should we use AI?" to "how can Umbraco aid both agencies operationally and aid our client's websites?" For us that means using it to make us more efficient in delivery so our team can spend more of their time on the work clients really value and how we innovate for our client's website visitors for a rich experience.

Stop selling websites

Two of the partner talks hit home: one asking whether your CMS pitch has kept up with how enterprise buyers now think, and another making the case for selling digital platforms rather than websites.

This matches how our longest client relationships already work. For the public sector bodies and charities we look after, the website isn't a project with an end date. It's a platform that has to keep evolving, connect to other systems and stay secure and supported for years. Talking about it that way from the very first conversation makes life easier for everyone.

Umbraco Cloud and v17

There was a strong focus on Umbraco Cloud and growing with it, including a partner talk on delivering an Umbraco Cloud v17 site in just three sprints. v17 is clearly where everyone's attention is now. We're in the middle of several v13 to v17 upgrades for clients at the moment, so it was good to compare notes with others doing the same.

There were also useful talks from other agencies about how their operational processes have been improved using AI. Brace Digital have made great strides this year improving our operations using AI and it was great to see other agencies on a similar journey.

The day finished at Flight Club in Shoreditch. We won't be sharing the darts scores.

Friday: UMBUK26

Friday's conference, organised by the Umbraco UK Foundation, brought the wider community together across three tracks for developers, creatives and partners. Bolette Kern opened with the product update, and the day closed with Lotte Pitcher and Sebastiaan Janssen's keynote on what Umbraco HQ hasn't thought of yet. In between, there was a lot to choose from.

Umbraco Automate

Rick Butterfield's session introducing Umbraco Automate was one we'd circled in advance. A lot of the content teams we work with spend time on repetitive tasks that follow the same steps every time. Anything that lets them hand those off without needing a developer for each one is a big deal, and we're already thinking about where we can put it to use for clients.

AI in the day job, with the grown-up questions

The developer track had a very practical feel when it came to AI. Steve Hart talked about using AI skills for Umbraco upgrades, Liam Laverty about using language models to find security issues, and Marcin Zajkowski about teaching AI fifteen years of Umbraco knowledge. Carole Rennie Logan's talk on non-functional requirements in the age of AI-assisted engineering was a good counterweight: AI can help you build faster, but performance, security, accessibility and maintainability still need people who know what good looks like.

That's very much how we see it. The tools are getting better quickly, and we're using them, but the judgement still has to come from experienced people.

Accessibility as a whole-business habit

Mike Masey's session on treating accessibility as something the whole business owns, rather than a check at the end, really resonated. A lot of our clients are public sector organisations and charities, where accessibility is a legal requirement as well as the right thing to do. It only really works when designers, developers, content editors and account managers all take it seriously from the start.

Getting found, by people and by machines

A couple of sessions looked at how content gets discovered now Matt Sutherland and Simon Lyder covered structured data and how to get your products cited by AI tools for GEO and AEO. More and more people are finding information through AI assistants rather than a list of search results, so structured, well-organised content matters more than ever. Something that we here at Brace Digital are constantly advocating for our clients to implement on their websites.

Laying old habits to rest

We also enjoyed Joe Glombek's look at coding practices to leave behind in 2027 whereby Joe shared with us development patterns which perhaps worked well in years gone by but need updating today and Jason Elkin's forensic approach to tracking down performance problems. Both were a useful nudge to look again at a few things we've done the same way for years.

What we're taking back from our two days in London

A few things we'll be acting on:

• Looking at where Umbraco Automate can save time for the client content teams we support

• Building more AI-assisted tooling into our upgrade process, especially for v13 to v17 work, while keeping a close eye on quality and governence

• Shouting louder to our clients about implementing more with structured data so our clients' content is easier to find, whether that's through search or AI (AEO and GEO)

• Continuing to treat accessibility as everyone's job, not a box to tick at the end

A big thank you to Umbraco HQ for the Partner Summit, and to the Umbraco UK Foundation, the speakers, sponsors and volunteers for UMBUK26. It was great to catch up with familiar faces and meet plenty of new ones.

If you're running an older Umbraco site and wondering what v17 and the new tooling could mean for you, we'd be happy to talk it through. Get in touch.