posit::conf(2025) Recap

2025-10-03

The energy at posit::conf(2025), both in Atlanta and virtually, was truly incredible! This year’s conference powerfully affirmed the global strength and innovation of our polyglot data science community.

With about 1,000 attendees in person and over 2,000 joining us online, the excitement spanned the globe. In fact, our in-person crowd represented 38 different countries, with attendees traveling all the way from Singapore, the Philippines, and Australia! When including all virtual participants, our community connected from an astounding 99 countries.

Results from our conf::funstats Shiny app!

The event was packed with cutting-edge R and Python insights, major product announcements, and unforgettable moments, including an exclusive community night at the Georgia Aquarium. Join us as we dive into the highlights below.

Didn’t catch everything live? All session recordings will be available on the event portal for the next few weeks (registration required) and on the Posit YouTube channel afterward.

All Eyes on Positron: The Next-Gen IDE

One of the major focuses of posit::conf(2025) was Positron, our new IDE designed to power both R and Python data science workflows.

We were thrilled to announce that Positron is now generally available for both Desktop and Posit Workbench. Attendees had the chance to dive deep, with demonstrations in the Learning Center, a dedicated Positron Lounge hosted by the development team, and numerous talks showcasing its capabilities.

A key highlight was Jonathan McPherson’s keynote, “10 Years of Data Science Tools…and What Happens Next.” He reflected on a decade of building RStudio and shared the guiding principles that led to the development of Positron, offering a compelling vision for the future of data science tooling. Watch a clip below:

Interested in trying out Positron? Download it today.

Tools for AI-powered data science workflows

Another theme at posit::conf(2025) was the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the data science workflow. We’ve released a powerful suite of tools over the past year to support these efforts, and the conference offered a deep dive into their capabilities.

Highlights include:

ellmer (for R) and chatlas (for Python): These open-source packages are central to Posit’s AI strategy, providing data scientists with simple, consistent interfaces for connecting to various LLM providers and performing advanced tasks like tool calling and structured data extraction.
shinychat: Seamlessly integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into your Shiny applications.
Positron Assistant and Databot: AI-powered features within the new Positron IDE to help streamline and accelerate your coding and analysis.
ragnar: This new package implements Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows for R users to ground LLM answers in their own documents.

For a comprehensive view of Posit’s strategy in this space, be sure to watch the keynote presentation by Hadley Wickham and Joe Cheng, “Making the Most of Artificial and Human Intelligence for Data Science.” Watch a clip below:

To stay informed about the latest product releases and insights in this rapidly evolving area, we encourage you to subscribe to the Posit AI Newsletter.

Powering enterprise, AI-driven data science with key partners

A core focus of posit::conf(2025) was demonstrating how Posit integrates with the world’s leading cloud and data platforms to deliver scalable, governed enterprise data science. We were proud to showcase our deepening collaboration with our key partners:

Snowflake

Our work with Snowflake highlights how data science teams can work closer than ever to their data. The power of Posit and Snowflake was brought to life in our opening customer story with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), “A Life-Saving Mission: How Data Science Helps NMDP Understand a Registry of 42 Million to Save More Lives.” NMDP leveraged this partner integration to ensure real-time accuracy and massive scale for a critical mission.

As Erica Jensen, Senior Vice President of Innovation, Strategy, and Marketing at NMDP, explains, “If we’re scoring the entire registry, 42 million donors is a lot of donors. We can leverage our integrations with Posit Connect and Snowflake to use our Snowflake warehouse as a large source of compute and offload some of that heavy lifting.”

In a standout session, “Championing modern science workflows to benefit dairy farmers”, Mark Neal from DairyNZ walked through their decision to choose Snowflake to handle the increasing volume of data from wearable devices. This strategic choice enables them to leverage modern data platforms and innovative Posit tools to ultimately improve the future for dairy farmers.

Databricks

The conference also featured our strong partnership with Databricks. Zac Davis and Rafi Kurlansik from Databricks provided a thorough demonstration showcasing advanced LLM operations in their talk, “From SDKs to Agents: Building with R and Python on Databricks.” They detailed how to set up a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server using a suite of integrated tools, including Positron, ellmer, mcptools, and brickster. This demonstration highlighted the tight integration needed to build scalable and complex AI workflows.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS remains a critical platform for our users, offering the scalable infrastructure and services needed for enterprise data science. During their Learning Center demo, “Building Agentic AI applications with Positron and AWS Strands Agents,” Greg Headley and Shun Mao from AWS introduced developers to AWS tools designed to support the creation of agentic AI applications. The session highlighted how Positron simplifies the building of these agents thanks to its intuitive interface and deep-rooted data science features.

We’d also like to extend a special thank you to AWS for sponsoring our unforgettable evening event at the Georgia Aquarium!

Momentum in open source

The Posit open source team had an explosion of updates to share at this year’s conference. Here are a few highlights:

Air (Lionel Henry and Davis Vaughn): A “blazingly fast R code formatter” built on Rust that ensures consistent code style across projects, integrating seamlessly into modern R workflows.
plumber2 (Thomas Lin Pedersen): A complete overhaul of the popular Plumber package, adding built-in support for WebSockets, richer type annotation, and leveraging Mirai for native asynchronous evaluation.
mirai (Charlie Gao): A minimalist framework for asynchronous R expression evaluation. It provides extreme performance and scalability for parallel processing, forming the backbone for new features in Shiny and plumber2.
vitals (Simon Couch): An essential new framework for Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation in R. It allows users to measure the effectiveness, cost, and latency of their LLM products (like those built with ellmer).
brand.yml (Garrick Aden-Buie): A new, unified specification for codifying an organization’s brand guidelines (colors, fonts, logos). It allows data scientists to apply professional, consistent styling across Quarto documents, Shiny apps, and reports using a single file.
Open Telemetry in Shiny (Barret Schloerke): The addition of OpenTelemetry support to Shiny allows developers to instrument their apps for distributed tracing and metrics. This provides critical visibility for diagnosing performance bottlenecks and managing complex production deployments.

Check out more open-source updates in the latest Glimpse newsletter.

Key updates across Posit enterprise and deployment products

Data science in the enterprise demands both speed and security. At posit::conf(2025), we shared several key updates across the Posit Team suite (Workbench, Connect, and Package Manager) designed to make scaling R and Python safe, easier, and more integrated.

Watch “Get the Latest on Posit’s Commercial Products”, or read a roundup below:

Enterprise security and operations

Posit Workbench: Enhanced auditing and monitoring capabilities were a major focus. New features include audited jobs and general availability of Prometheus metrics to give IT and data science leaders better visibility into server and user session activity. Positron is also officially available within Workbench.
Posit Connect: Content deployment just got more flexible with the ability to build container images directly in Connect.
Posit Package Manager: You can now better protect your code supply chain with repository-level SSO authentication, and developers can quickly see package vulnerabilities and metadata within the RStudio IDE in Workbench.
Posit Chronicle: Centralizing metrics operations is easier than ever, as Chronicle now aggregates metrics across all Posit Team servers.

Deployment flexibility and cloud integration

We announced new ways for organizations to deploy and manage Posit Team:

Posit Team Dedicated: This is a new, self-hosted yet Posit-managed deployment option for the Posit Team suite, offering the control of on-premises infrastructure with the convenience of Posit’s management expertise.
Snowflake Integration: For the tightest possible cloud integration, Posit Team is now available as a Native App in Snowflake. This currently includes Posit Workbench and Posit Connect, with Package Manager integration coming soon.
Posit Connect Cloud: New organization plans and the ability to publish content directly from IDEs make it simpler for teams to collaborate and share insights without needing to manage their own infrastructure. Alex Chisholm shares more in his talk, “Keeping Data Alive: Persistent Storage Options for Dynamic Cloud Applications“. And, with the new Posit Publisher, users can now publish content directly from VS Code or Positron to Connect Cloud.

Thank you, and save the date for 2026!

posit::conf(2025) was such a success, thanks to the enthusiasm of our global community and the support of our partners. A heartfelt thank you to all of our conference sponsors: AWS, Appsilon, Jumping Rivers, A2-Ai, ProCogia, and Atorus. Your commitment to open-source data science and the Posit ecosystem helps make this event possible.

We hope this recap has provided a useful summary of the innovations, product announcements, and energy we all shared.