Ai4 2026: Dates, Speakers, Tickets & Event Guide

TL;DR: Ai4 2026 runs August 4-6, 2026 at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada, as an in-person, applied-AI conference expecting 12,000-plus attendees, 1,000-plus speakers, and 400-plus exhibitors from 90-plus countries. The headline draw is a rare joint keynote conversation featuring Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng, alongside Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov and Sebastian Thrun and executives from Cisco, PayPal, Mayo Clinic, and dozens of other enterprise names. Registration runs on an ascending pricing model, tickets get more expensive the closer you book to August, and as of this writing the walk-up prices sit at $3,195 for a Standard Pass and $5,955 for VIP, with a discount still active for anyone who registers now. There is no zplatform-specific discount code for this one, so what you see on the official registration page is what you pay.

I have spent 15-plus years testing AI and SaaS tools, and every year I watch which conferences the tools I cover actually show up at. That is how I ended up tracking AI events the same way I track AI tool deals, both are early signals for where a market is actually headed, not where the marketing says it is headed. Ai4 caught my attention because it has quietly become the conference every enterprise AI vendor treats as a must-attend, not a nice-to-have.

In this guide, I confirm the exact dates and venue, break down who the confirmed speakers actually are, walk through the real ticket pricing (including where it is genuinely unclear), and give you an honest read on whether the trip is worth it depending on what you do for a living. Every fact below is cross-checked against Ai4’s own site at ai4.io and multiple independent press coverage of the 2026 event, not just one aggregator’s guess.

If you only need the short version: Ai4 is the biggest applied-AI conference in the US by attendee count, it is squarely built for enterprise buyers and builders rather than casual AI hobbyists, and the ticket price reflects that. Here is the full breakdown.

Key Takeaways

• Three days, one venue, no virtual option. Ai4 2026 runs August 4-6, 2026, fully in person at The Venetian in Las Vegas, with pre-conference workshops and summits on August 3.
• Scale most AI conferences do not touch. Organizers expect 12,000-plus attendees, 1,000-plus speakers, and 400-plus exhibitors from more than 90 countries, making Ai4 the largest applied-AI event in the country.
• A genuinely rare keynote lineup. Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng are appearing together in a headline conversation, alongside Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov and Sebastian Thrun and enterprise leaders from Cisco, PayPal, Mayo Clinic, Ford, and more.
• Agentic AI and RAG dominate the agenda. Dedicated tracks cover agentic AI in production, enterprise-scale agent deployment, and retrieval-augmented generation, alongside vertical tracks for finance, healthcare, retail, and government.
• Pricing is a moving target, and there is no zplatform code. Ai4 raises prices in tiers as the event approaches. Confirm the live number on the official registration page before booking, since I could not verify a fixed current price with full confidence.

Ai4 is not a conference where you go to hear that AI is important. Every attendee already believes that. You go to hear the specific tracks enterprises are already using to put agentic AI into production, and to sit in a room with the people building the models everyone else is still theorizing about.

What Is Ai4 2026?

Ai4 bills itself as America’s largest AI conference, and at 12,000-plus expected attendees, that is not a marketing exaggeration, it is one of the largest single-venue AI events on the calendar anywhere. The 2026 edition runs across three main conference days, August 4-6, with pre-conference trainings and summits on August 3 for attendees who arrive early. Organizer CloserStill Media has run Ai4 as a strictly applied-AI event since its founding, meaning the agenda leans toward “how are you actually using this in production” over academic theory.

What sets the 2026 edition apart is the keynote lineup. Getting Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng on the same stage is unusual even by AI-conference standards, these are three of the most cited researchers in modern machine learning, and Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational work on neural networks. Pairing that kind of research pedigree with Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov and Sebastian Thrun, plus a bench of enterprise executives from Cisco, PayPal, AstraZeneca, and Mayo Clinic, tells you this event is trying to bridge two audiences at once: the researchers building frontier models and the enterprise buyers deciding whether to deploy them.

This is not a trade-show floor pretending to be a conference. With 400-plus exhibitors and an AI Startup Pitch stage alongside the main tracks, there is a commercial layer here too, but the programming itself is built around real deployment case studies, not vendor pitches dressed up as keynotes. I track the best AI tools I have personally tested because vendor claims and real-world results are frequently two different things, and a conference this size is exactly where that gap tends to show up in the hallway conversations, not just the main stage.

When and Where Is Ai4 2026?

Ai4 2026 takes place August 4-6, 2026, at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada (3355 Las Vegas Blvd S). Pre-conference programming, including a Technical Summit, a Business Summit, and partner-led trainings on generative AI and RAG in practice, runs the day before on August 3.

Las Vegas as a host city is a practical choice for an event this size. Harry Reid International Airport sits minutes from the Strip, hotel inventory can absorb 12,000-plus attendees without the city running out of rooms, and The Venetian’s convention space is built to handle exactly this scale of trade-show-plus-conference programming. Early August also lands before the worst of back-to-school travel and after the summer holiday crunch, though Vegas heat in August is genuinely brutal if you are walking between hotel towers, so plan accordingly.

Unlike some enterprise AI conferences that added hybrid or virtual attendance after 2020, Ai4 2026 is confirmed as an in-person-only event. There is no listed livestream or online pass option on the official site, which matters if budget or travel restrictions are a factor for your team, plan for the full travel cost rather than assuming a cheaper remote tier exists.

Quick facts:

Detail	Information
Event	Ai4 2026
Dates	August 4-6, 2026 (pre-conference August 3)
Venue	The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV, USA
Format	In-person only, no confirmed virtual/hybrid option
Scale	12,000+ attendees, 1,000+ speakers, 400+ exhibitors, 90+ countries
Organizer	CloserStill Media
Themes	Agentic AI, RAG, enterprise AI deployment, AI policy, cross-industry adoption
Official site	ai4.io

Who Should Attend Ai4 2026?

Ai4’s own positioning targets business leaders, government decision-makers, researchers, and data practitioners, which is a wide net, but the reality on the ground at an event this size skews heavily toward people with budget authority or deployment responsibility, not students or casual AI enthusiasts.

You are likely to get real value out of Ai4 2026 if you fit one of these profiles:

• Enterprise AI and data leaders evaluating how peers at companies like Ford, Truist, or AstraZeneca are actually moving agentic AI pilots into production, not just running proof-of-concepts that never ship.
• Product and engineering leaders building with RAG or agent frameworks who want direct exposure to the operational guardrails, observability, and cost trade-offs the enterprise-scale agentic deployment track is built around.
• Founders and go-to-market teams selling into enterprise AI buyers, since 400-plus exhibitors and an AI Startup Pitch stage mean genuine deal-making happens on the floor, not just in the sessions.
• Policy, government, and compliance professionals who need direct exposure to how AI governance conversations are evolving across finance, healthcare, and government tracks.
• Anyone weighing whether a Standard or VIP pass is worth the premium, since the format rewards people who can commit to three full days rather than dipping in for a single afternoon.

Here is the honest caveat. If you are early in your AI career with no deployment or budget responsibility yet, Ai4 will feel expensive relative to the value you can extract from it. This is not a beginner AI-literacy event, it is a working buyers-and-builders conference, and the ticket price reflects that positioning.

If you are deciding whether to send a small AI evaluation team to Ai4 or skip it in favor of smaller regional events, the deciding factor often is not the keynotes, it is the enterprise-scale agentic deployment track. Say your team is already six months into a chatbot pilot that will not scale past a demo, the session lineup on orchestration and governance is directly relevant to the exact wall you have hit. One cost-conscious approach: send one senior engineer for the full three days and have the rest of the team watch recorded session summaries afterward, a split that keeps the cost down while still getting the specific track content that matters.

Ai4 2026 Speakers and Keynote Lineup

The headline of the 2026 lineup is a rare joint keynote conversation featuring Geoffrey Hinton (2024 Nobel laureate in Physics for foundational neural network research, often called the “Godfather of AI”), Fei-Fei Li (Stanford HAI co-director and creator of the ImageNet dataset that helped kick off the deep learning era), and Andrew Ng (Stanford professor, DeepLearning.AI and Coursera co-founder). Getting all three on one stage is genuinely unusual, most conferences are lucky to land one of these names in a given year.

Beyond that headline conversation, confirmed speakers include:

Speaker	Known For
Geoffrey Hinton	Neural networks, 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics
Fei-Fei Li	Computer vision, ImageNet, Stanford HAI
Andrew Ng	Machine learning education, DeepLearning.AI, Coursera
Dmitri Dolgov	Co-CEO, Waymo
Sebastian Thrun	Self-driving pioneer, Udacity founder
Tom Gruber	Co-founder, Siri
Timothée Lacroix	Co-founder, Mistral AI
Ben Goertzel	AGI researcher, SingularityNET

Alongside those names, Ai4’s own speaker lineup announcement confirms executives from Cisco, PayPal, Priceline, AstraZeneca, Mayo Clinic, Ford Motor, Caterpillar, NBCUniversal, and Truist, plus representatives from the American Medical Association, Airbus, and the U.S. Air Force, and media leaders from Fortune, CNN, Axios, and BBC. A few names outside the usual tech-conference mold also show up on the confirmed list, Steve Preston of Goodwill Industries International, Tom Flanagan of RE/MAX, and former NBA player Metta World Peace, which signals Ai4 is positioning AI adoption as a cross-industry story rather than a pure tech-sector one.

What Does the Ai4 2026 Agenda Cover?

Ai4’s published agenda is organized around applied deployment rather than research theory, and three tracks stand out as the core of the 2026 programming: Agentic AI, which covers autonomous agent frameworks, multimodal integration, and workflow automation across industries; Enterprise-Scale Agentic Deployment, which focuses specifically on moving from pilot agents to production, covering orchestration layers, governance of tool and data access, human-in-the-loop patterns, and the cost-versus-latency trade-offs that kill most pilots before they scale; and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), covering how to combine large language models with proprietary data for more relevant, context-specific outputs.

Alongside those three, the agenda runs dozens of co-located industry-vertical tracks, including finance, healthcare, retail, cybersecurity, and government, plus an AI Policy Summit and an AI Startup Pitch stage. Pre-conference on August 3 adds two hands-on trainings run in partnership with General Assembly: one on generative AI and AI agents for business and product leaders, and one on agentic operations and RAG in practice.

That range matters because it reflects where enterprise AI actually is in 2026, past the experimentation phase and into the harder problem of governance, reliability, and measurable ROI. A track explicitly built around “why pilots do not scale” is a more useful signal of Ai4’s seriousness than another generic “future of AI” keynote would be.

Ai4 2026 Schedule: What Each Day Actually Looks Like

With the event about two weeks out, the daily schedule matters more than the track list, because it decides whether you can realistically catch the keynotes, work the exhibit hall, and still make your flights. Here is the day-by-day rhythm straight from Ai4’s own agenda overview, not a guess.

Pre-conference day: Monday, August 3

The Monday before the main event is a pre-conference day, and there is no programming until around 1:00 PM. The leadership summits begin at 2:00 PM, industry meetups kick off at 5:00 PM, and the day wraps by 6:30 PM. Two honest caveats worth planning around: the summits have limited capacity and require an RSVP, and the hands-on AI trainings are an additional purchase on top of your conference pass, not included by default. Opening keynotes, track sessions, and the exhibit hall do not start until Tuesday morning, so do not fly in Monday expecting the full show.

A typical conference day: August 4-6

Each main conference day follows the same shape, and it is a long one, so pace yourself:

• 7:00 AM - Doors open and breakfast
• 8:25 AM - Opening keynote sessions
• 10:15 AM - Track sessions begin and the exhibit hall opens
• 12:30 PM - Lunch
• 4:00 PM - Closing keynote sessions

Note the exhibit hall does not open until 10:15 AM, so the early morning is keynote-first by design. If exhibitors are your main reason for attending, the useful floor hours run from mid-morning through the afternoon, not from doors-open.

On the final night, Thursday, August 6, the official Ai4 afterparty runs at TAO starting around 9:00 PM, with programming ending by 11:00 PM. It is sponsored by 1mind, Dell Technologies, Lightning AI, and Optimizely, and it is genuinely part of the networking value, the hallway-and-afterparty conversations at an event this size are where most of the real deal-making happens.

Plan your agenda before you land

With 1,000-plus speakers across more than a dozen tracks, you cannot wing this on-site. Ai4 publishes the full session-level schedule at ai4.io/agenda-full, and it offers a personalized agenda builder that filters sessions by your industry, role, technical level, and the specific tracks you care about (AI Agents, RAG, Generative AI, governance, and vertical special-interest tracks). There is also an official Ai4 app on iOS and Android that syncs your saved sessions. My practical advice: build your shortlist the week before, not in the registration line, or you will spend day one figuring out where to be instead of being there.

Ai4 2026 Ticket Prices

Ai4 sells tickets on an ascending-tier model, meaning the price goes up several times as the event gets closer, and the exact current price on any given day depends on which tier is active. Here is what I could verify from Ai4’s own registration announcements and pricing history:

Tier	Standard Pass	VIP Pass	Status
Super early bird	Around $1,395 (up to 56% off final price)	Not separately confirmed	Closed February 5, 2026
Spring pricing	$1,695	Not separately confirmed	Increased around April 9, 2026
Current (“Last Minute Registration”)	Roughly 19% off final price	Roughly 35% off final price	Active now, increases without much notice
Final / walk-up price	$3,195	$5,955	Applies at or near the event

I could not independently verify the exact dollar figure active on any given day of the “Last Minute Registration” tier, Ai4 raises prices on short notice and the live number only shows on the registration page at the moment you check. Confirm the current price on the official Ai4 registration page before booking rather than trusting any cached figure, including this one.

A quick reality check on value here. Even at the top end, $3,195 to $5,955 for three days that include 1,000-plus speakers and direct access to researchers like Hinton, Li, and Ng is not unusual pricing for an enterprise-scale AI conference, comparable events in this tier routinely land in the same range. The steep jump from super early bird to walk-up pricing is the real story: registering months out instead of weeks out can save you more than half the ticket cost, which is a genuinely actionable takeaway if you are planning next year’s budget around this one.

Discounts, Passes, and Group Options

Ai4 does not run a public sitewide discount code the way some smaller conferences do, and there is no zplatform-specific partnership discount for this event, I want to be upfront about that rather than inventing one just to make this guide feel more useful.

What does exist, confirmed directly through Ai4’s own site structure, is a set of qualification-based discounted passes: a Startup Pass for early-stage companies, an Enterprise AI Buyer Pass application for qualifying enterprise decision-makers, and a Government, Academia & Non-Profit Pass application for public-sector and educational attendees. None of these publish a fixed discounted price on the pages I could access, they appear to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis after you apply, so the honest move is to apply directly through ai4.io and see what rate you qualify for rather than assuming a specific percentage off.

I also could not find a published multi-attendee group discount tier for Ai4 2026 the way some testing and dev conferences run one. If you are sending a team of three or more, it is worth asking the registration team directly whether an unpublished team rate exists, some large conferences quietly offer this without advertising it, but I cannot confirm one either way for Ai4.

If you want to know the next time a real, verified discount shows up for an AI event I have actually confirmed, subscribe for AI deal and event alerts rather than relying on a code circulating on social media that may no longer be valid.

Is Ai4 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take

For enterprise AI buyers, product leaders shipping agentic systems, and go-to-market teams selling into that audience, Ai4 2026 is one of the highest-value conferences on the calendar this year, mainly because of who else is in the room. A keynote lineup that includes Hinton, Li, and Ng together, alongside Waymo leadership and Fortune 500 AI executives, is not something you can replicate by watching recorded talks later. The hallway conversations at an event with 12,000 attendees and 400 exhibitors are where deals and hiring decisions actually happen.

The honest caveats are about cost and fit, not quality. Walk-up pricing at $3,195 to $5,955 is a serious line item for a smaller company or an independent consultant, and there is no confirmed cheaper remote option if travel and Las Vegas hotel costs are the blocker. This is also squarely an enterprise event, not a beginner AI-literacy conference, and someone early in their AI career will get more value from smaller, cheaper regional events first.

Here is my buy-or-skip framing, the same one I apply when weighing AI tool deals against their real business value. Register now if you can name two specific tracks, agentic deployment, RAG, or a vertical track like healthcare or finance, that map directly to a project your team is already working on, and if the travel cost is justifiable against what closing that project gap is worth. Wait and register closer to the event only if budget flexibility matters more than saving money, since the walk-up price is real and will cost you the discount. Skip it entirely if you are early-career with no deployment budget or authority yet, and look for a smaller, cheaper regional AI event first.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where is Ai4 2026?

Ai4 2026 runs August 4-6, 2026, at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada, with pre-conference summits and trainings on August 3. It is an in-person-only event with no confirmed virtual or hybrid attendance option.

How much do Ai4 2026 tickets cost?

Pricing is tiered and increases as the event approaches. Super early-bird pricing (closed February 5, 2026) started around $1,395, spring pricing moved to $1,695, and final walk-up prices are $3,195 for a Standard Pass and $5,955 for a VIP Pass. Confirm the exact current price on ai4.io before booking, since it changes on short notice.

Who is speaking at Ai4 2026?

The headline is a joint keynote conversation with Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng, plus Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov and Sebastian Thrun, Siri co-founder Tom Gruber, Mistral AI co-founder Timothée Lacroix, and executives from Cisco, PayPal, Mayo Clinic, Ford Motor, and other major enterprises.

Is there a discount code for Ai4 2026?

Not one I could verify, and there is no zplatform.ai partnership code for this event. Ai4 does offer qualification-based discounted passes for startups, enterprise buyers, and government/academia/non-profit attendees through its own application pages.

Is Ai4 good for AI beginners?

Not really. Ai4 is built for enterprise buyers, product leaders, and technical practitioners with real deployment responsibility. Someone new to AI with no project or budget context will get more value from a smaller, more introductory event first.

How big is Ai4 2026?

Organizers expect more than 12,000 attendees, 1,000-plus speakers, and 400-plus exhibitors from over 90 countries, making it one of the largest applied-AI conferences in the US.

The Bottom Line

Ai4 2026 backs up its “America’s largest AI conference” claim with a genuinely rare keynote lineup and programming built around the hardest part of enterprise AI right now: getting agentic systems and RAG pipelines out of pilot mode and into production. That focus, plus the sheer density of enterprise buyers in one venue, is what separates it from a typical AI conference full of vendor pitches dressed up as keynotes.

The insight worth taking with you: the real value here is not the keynote stage, it is the enterprise-scale deployment and RAG tracks where the specific governance and reliability problems your team is already stuck on get addressed directly. Anyone can watch a Hinton, Li, or Ng talk on YouTube eventually. Sitting in a room with the people who already solved your exact deployment problem is the part you cannot replicate later.

Your concrete next step for Ai4 2026: check the official Ai4 registration page for the live price before it steps up again, and confirm which track, agentic deployment, RAG, or a specific industry vertical, actually maps to what your team is stuck on right now. While you are deciding, browse the AI tools I have personally tested so the sessions on agent frameworks and RAG land with more context once you are in the room.