Phil Whittaker is an AI Staff Engineer at Umbraco chiefly responsible for improving how a 20-year-old open-source CMS gets used by agents, not just by people. This includes building the Umbraco MCP platform and the suite of open-source Umbraco Agent Skills that show AI coding tools the right patterns to extend the CMS.

Twenty-five years in, Phil has been an agency founder, a CTO and a lead engineer. He's spent a decade running the Umbraco Manchester and Leeds meetups, and more recently co-founded Practically AI, Manchester's real-world AI meetup, which has run monthly for a year and averages nearly 100 people each time.

He regularly speaks about MCP, Agent Skills, agentic software engineering and how to be a better human through AI, both in the UK and internationally.