In October I flew to Berlin for n8n In The Loop 2026, n8n’s first community and builder conference. It ran at Wilhelm Studios, an old brick industrial building in the north of the city.
That set the tone: casual, a bit rough around the edges, and very much about the people inside.
Meeting the people behind the screen
I have been part of the n8n Ambassador program for a while now. Most of that time has happened online, through messages, calls, and the occasional late night question when a workflow would not behave.
So the part I was looking forward to most was meeting the people who have helped us the most: Mellinda, Jacq, Miha Ambros and Bart. They have supported us as ambassadors for a long time, and it was really fun to finally sit down, laugh, and talk face to face instead of through a screen.
I also met ambassadors from many other countries. It is funny how people in completely different markets end up fighting the same problems: messy data, clients who want everything automated yesterday, and that one API that never returns what the docs say it will.
Seeing n8n at enterprise scale
Most of my work with n8n is with smaller teams. Usually that means one instance, a handful of workflows, and a client who just wants the manual work gone.
So it was eye opening to hear how companies like Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft and SAP run n8n. At that size, building the workflow is the easy part. The hard questions are about everything around it: who is allowed to build and deploy, how workflows get reviewed and versioned, how you keep credentials and data under control, and how you keep a growing set of workflows running without one person holding all the knowledge.
Michael Deptuch from Mercedes-Benz walked through their playbook for running n8n in production. Their platform work covers custom nodes, role based access, and data and governance on one side, then custom templates, automated deployments, and observability and KPIs on the other.
Oliver Dörr from Microsoft showed where n8n sits in their enterprise AI architecture, with n8n as the control plane to build, deploy and govern AI workflows and agents, next to Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Agent 365. SAP ran a session on moving from single agents to end to end agentic processes with n8n inside SAP Joule Studio. Bayer, Nvidia, Telus, Bosch and Albertsons were on the agenda too.
It made me rethink how I set things up even for small clients. A lot of what enterprises do out of necessity, like clear ownership, separate environments, and documentation, is just good practice at any size. The difference is that at enterprise scale you cannot skip it, because the person who built the workflow will eventually be on holiday, or in another team, or gone.
A minute on the stage
Between sessions, the main stage was empty, so of course I went up and stood behind the podium for a photo. Nobody was watching. I will take it anyway.
Thanks
Thank you to the n8n team for organizing the event and for bringing the ambassadors together. And thank you to everyone I talked to, whether it was for an hour or five minutes in the hallway.
If you want to see what the day covered, the full agenda is still online.
See you next year.
