After years of incremental evolution, OpenCV 5 brings big changes to the world’s most popular CV library. We’ll share our first impressions of how these changes impact real development. We’ll start with the practical migration reality—what breaks, what ports cleanly and where C++17 modernization and the removal of the legacy C API force pipeline refactors. We’ll then evaluate the features that matter for edge and production teams: native support for multimodal workflows and vision-language models, updates to the inference engine for running modern architectures (including transformer-based models and recent YOLO variants) and early performance results from the new Universal Intrinsics acceleration path. Throughout, we’ll focus on techniques and lessons learned from bringing representative vision pipelines forward and assessing correctness, latency and maintainability. Attendees will leave with a clear “migration ROI” framework and concrete guidance on who should adopt OpenCV 5 now versus waiting for a later release.