Jan Curn
Founder & CEO of Apify
Prague, Czechia
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Jan Curn is the founder and CEO of Apify (https://apify.com), a full-stack web scraping and automation platform that powers (not only) AI agents with up-to-date data. He has a lifelong passion for software engineering, which earned him an MSc and PhD in computer science and eventually led him to founding Apify. Jan lives between SF and Prague, is active in the tech community in both cities, organizes meetups, and talks about software, startups, or AI.
Area of Expertise
The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP
Thanks to MCP and all the MCP server directories, agents can now autonomously discover new tools and other agents. This lays down the foundation for the future agentic economy, where businesses will sell to autonomous agents (B2A) and eventually agents will sell to other agents (A2A).
But one key part is still missing: agents do not have a standard way to subscribe to external services and pay for them.
In this talk, we’ll show how to give agents full autonomy to discover and pay for new external MCP-enabled services, even if those services don’t support it, using a little-known MCP server nesting capability. We’ll also cover how to monetize AI agents and the B2A/A2A business models.
How to scrape modern websites to feed AI agents
It was web scraping that quietly enabled the AI revolution.
All major generative AI models and large language models (LLMs) have been trained on massive datasets extracted from the web. But the story doesn’t end there. Today’s AI agents still rely on up-to-date information from online sources to stay relevant, reduce hallucinations, and go beyond their training data. Once again, the web becomes the richest source of context.
Yet scraping the modern web is far from trivial. From anti-bot protections to dynamic, client-side rendering and long-term maintenance issues, building scalable data pipelines has become increasingly complex.
In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how to:
- Set up resilient, maintainable data extraction workflows using cloud-based web scraping Actors,
- Clean messy HTML and structure it into meaningful content,
- Feed that data into a vector database to power a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline,
- And integrate scraping tools directly into AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Whether you're building copilots, smart assistants, or knowledge-augmented LLM apps, this talk will equip you with the techniques and tools to make the web your AI's best friend.
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