Firechat: The Future of AI Workflows | Jan Oberhauser & Luca Rossi | Productlab Conf 2026

📺 PRODUCTLAB CONFERENCE, Berlin 2026 Productlab Conference 2026 brought around 1K+ product people to Berlin and online for three days: Leaders Lab for senior product leaders on 15 Sept, hands-on AI-Craft Day workshops on 16 Sept, and Conference Day on 17 Sept across three stages at The Social Hub and CIC Berlin. The thread running through the week: AI made individuals faster, but organisations, judgment and context are where the real work is now. ✨ About the talk Luca Rossi, founder of Refactoring and a long-time n8n user, presses n8n founder and CEO Jan Oberhauser on how the company moved into AI. Jan explains why n8n focuses on business-critical workflows that mix AI, deterministic code and humans in the loop rather than letting an agent run everything as a black box, and why its first AI features took more than a year to gain traction: teams often feel late when they are actually early. They talk about how being profitable lets n8n turn down large contracts that would make the product worse, and why Jan is still torn on open source in the AI era. The last part covers how AI changed n8n's own team, from internal agents to two PMs per six engineers, and its goal of a billion users with fewer than a thousand employees. 🎤 About the Speakers Jan Oberhauser is the founder and CEO of n8n, an extensible AI workflow automation platform built for technical teams. Before n8n he worked as a VFX pipeline engineer at Academy Award-winning studios, building tooling that helped large teams of artists work more efficiently. That shaped his belief that powerful automation should be accessible to the people who build things. He founded n8n in 2019, and it has grown into one of Europe's best-known developer-focused startups. Luca Rossi (interviewer) is the founder of Refactoring.fm, a newsletter and podcast about running better engineering teams that goes out weekly to more than 175,000 engineers and managers. He has written 300+ articles. Before Refactoring he led Engineering at Translated.com and was co-founder and CTO of Wanderio, where he grew the product from 0 to 25M customers. 🌐 More talks, slides and Productlab Conference 2027 (8-10 Sept, Berlin): https://productlab.app 🎥 Video: Aleksandra Kononchenko