A fire needs three things: something to strike it, something to feed it, and something worth burning for. Robots & Pencils spent six weeks on the first, three days in a Cleveland skyscraper on the second, and it’s building the third right now. We call the whole arc RoboCon 2026: Rise of the Agents, and if you were anywhere near downtown Cleveland the week of July 21st, you felt it.
This is the first of many stories we’ll tell about what happened here. Before we get to the pods, the points, and the people who pulled all-nighters, it’s worth answering the plain questions. Who did this, what actually happened, when, where, and why any of it mattered. Three phases carry that story: Spark lit the competition; Ignite brought it together in Cleveland, and Surge is the follow-through happening right now.
What is RoboCon?
RoboCon 26 is Robots & Pencils’ internal AI competition, built to transform how we work with our clients and each other. Our CEO Len Pagon kicked things off on June 12th with 56 leaders from across the company.
“Most companies are still figuring out how to start. We are already doing it. We design the architecture that takes AI from a demo into the actual work of the business. That is harder than it sounds. Most cannot. We can and we do.”
That gap, between demoing AI and actually running a business on it, is the whole reason RoboCon exists. Pagon had the data to prove it, a six-level AI proficiency ladder gleaned from usage and a proprietary assessment tool. It showed exactly how and where the company could accelerate and codify its generative and agentic AI capabilities across every single current and future employee. “The pace is fast because the window is now,” Pagon told the room, “not next quarter, not another planning cycle.”
So he picked roughly a quarter of the company, the leaders who could carry the change back to their teams, split them into seven pods of about eight people each, and told them to compete.
Spark: The Competition
Spark ran six weekly challenges, and each one moved the pods a step further down the same road: start by setting a shared culture baseline in the newly written Pencil Way, then build something real with the tools, then improve it, then apply it to actual client work. Partway through the six weeks, the competition stopped belonging only to the seven pods. Spark opened up to the whole company, a cohort of allies, and the job was to mentor them through the similar tasks the pod had already worked through. Their learning and their work counted toward their pod’s score. One rule sat above all the scoring: “Client work comes first,” Pagon told everyone. “That if you ever have to choose between working for our client, or you got to do this challenge, the client comes first…always!”
Ignite: Three Days in Cleveland
Six weeks of remote sprinting funneled into three days in person, July 21st through 23rd. Jeff Kirk, EVP of Applied AI, set the tone once everyone was on site.
“It’s time to get into ultra-learning mode,” he said. “To work backwards from our most important customer outcomes and continue to incorporate AI agents into our professional services motion.” He pushed the room toward something harder than a workshop agenda. “Use radical candor with your colleagues and solve some of the most critical challenges that we’re facing on a day-to-day basis as we innovate on behalf of our clients – we transfer our know-how to our clients as a result of Robots & Pencils working with them.”
The three days played out exactly that tension between celebration and work. A championship reception opened things on July 21st, in Pagon’s own backyard. The next two days filled Key Tower’s meeting rooms with keynotes, breakout sessions, and afternoon hackathons, where seven pods turned six weeks of practice into something they could stand behind. Stay tuned for individual and pod stories.
Surge: Bringing it Home
It would be easy to read Ignite as the climax of the story. It was the culmination of Spark, no question. But Pagon frames it as the first 2 phases as preparation for the most important phase, not an ending. Ignite closed with a personal commitment from every participant: one shift they were making, a few ideas for their team, and a 30, 60, and 90-day plan to make it stick. Read a handful of them back-to-back and the range says more about Surge than any recap could.
“RoboCon reinforced something for me,” said Kristy Andersen, senior delivery manager. “Individual AI fluency is the floor. Organizational AI capability is where things accelerate and impact compounds.”
Pagon called RoboCon an investment in our people and the company, the kind that doesn’t pay off in three days. It pays off in what people do with what they learned once the reception ends and the ballgame’s over. That work is Surge. It’s already underway, and it’s the story we’ll keep telling from here.
