COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026: Dates, Speakers, Passes & Full Guide (Atlanta, Oct 1)

TL;DR: The COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026 runs Thursday, October 1, 2026 at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center in metro Atlanta, billed as the South’s largest data and AI trade show. It gathers Fortune 500 data and AI decision-makers around the theme “AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production,” with an early-bird all-access pass at $499 (regular $999) and a free complimentary pass for qualified enterprise leaders.

Why I’m Covering the COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026

I track data and AI conferences year-round because the platforms, governance patterns, and tools that enterprise leaders debate on stage tend to surface in the deal tracking and AI tool reviews I usually publish within a few months. The COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026 is a useful early signal for that, because it is built for the people actually deciding how AI gets bought, governed, and shipped inside large companies.

This is not a developer hackathon or a startup demo day. COLLIDE 2026 is an enterprise event organized by Data Science Connect, aimed squarely at the senior data and AI executives at Fortune 500 and other large organizations. The 2026 theme, “AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production,” tells you exactly where the conversation sits: not whether to use AI, but how to operationalize it at scale without breaking governance, security, or the budget. That single trend, the move from experiment to production, is what every senior decision-maker in the room is wrestling with right now.

If you lead a data or AI function, sell into enterprise data teams, or just want to know what the people running AI at companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, and Truist are prioritizing in 2026, this guide lays out the dates, the venue, the speaker lineup, the pass options (including the free one), the agenda themes, and an honest read on who should attend and who can skip it.

I will walk through the quick facts, the program pillars, the registration math, and the logistics. The official site at datasciconnect.com has the live agenda and the final speaker roster, but the breakdown below should help you decide before you fill out a registration form.

COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026 Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Event name	COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026
Date	Thursday, October 1, 2026
Hours	9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (per the Eventbrite listing)
Venue	Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center
Location	Sandy Springs, GA, less than 15 miles from Midtown Atlanta
Format	In-person, single-day trade show and conference
Organizer	Data Science Connect
2026 theme	AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production
Positioning	The South’s largest data and AI trade show
Audience	Enterprise data and AI decision-makers (Fortune 500 and large orgs)
All-access pass	$499 early bird (regular $999)
Complimentary pass	Free for qualified non-vendor enterprise leaders ($999 value)
Media pass	Free for qualified journalists, influencers, and media
Featured speakers	20+ named (more announced closer to the event)
Official website	https://datasciconnect.com/events/collide/
Contact	amelia@datasciconnect.com

Key Takeaways

• COLLIDE 2026 is a one-day enterprise data and AI conference in Atlanta on October 1. It runs at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center and is positioned as the South’s largest data and AI trade show, organized by Data Science Connect.

• The theme is operational, not experimental. “AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production” frames the entire program around scaling, governing, and securing AI that ties to real business outcomes, rather than another round of model demos.

• The audience is senior and enterprise-heavy. Featured speakers hold VP, SVP, and director-level data and AI roles at companies including Televisa Univision, Truist, Coca-Cola, and AT&T. This is a room of decision-makers, not juniors.

• There is a genuinely free pass. Qualified non-vendor enterprise leaders can apply for a complimentary in-person pass valued at $999. If you do not qualify, the early-bird all-access pass is $499 versus a $999 regular price.

• It is part of a larger 2026 series. Data Science Connect also runs the ALIGN AI Executive Summits across several US cities and an AI Enterprise Conference in New York, so COLLIDE is the Atlanta flagship in a broader enterprise AI circuit.

What Is the COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026?

The COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026 is a single-day, in-person enterprise conference and trade show held October 1, 2026 in metro Atlanta, organized by Data Science Connect. It brings together senior data and AI leaders from large enterprises with the solution and service providers that sell into them, around a shared goal: building the foundations of the AI-driven era inside real organizations.

The organizer frames COLLIDE as the place “where decision-makers from the South’s largest enterprises and leading-edge solutions and service providers come together.” In practice that means three things the event repeats often: connect with enterprise data and AI leaders, learn how to scale and govern AI responsibly, and benchmark with peers through roundtables and dinners. The format leans on general sessions, breakout tracks, panels, an exhibit hall, and structured networking rather than a sprawling multi-day program.

What separates COLLIDE from a general tech conference is the seniority filter. This is not built for individual contributors looking to learn a framework. It is built for the people who own data and AI strategy, governance, and budgets at companies large enough to have a Fair and Responsible Banking Analytics function or a dedicated Data Governance Platforms director. That focus shapes everything from the agenda to the networking format.

Who COLLIDE 2026 Is Built For

The attendee profile skews toward senior enterprise data and AI roles. Here is how I read the target list based on the speaker lineup and the event’s own positioning.

Chief data and AI officers and VPs: The people who own the data and AI function at an enterprise are the core audience. Sessions on governance, platform strategy, and AI economics are aimed at the leaders who answer to the board for AI spend and risk.

Data science and ML engineering leaders: Directors and senior managers running data science, ML, and AI engineering teams will find the production-focused content most relevant. The agenda explicitly covers LLMOps, evaluation, and agents as systems, which are the day-to-day concerns of these teams.

Data governance, privacy, and risk leaders: With named speakers in fair and responsible analytics, data governance, data privacy, and quality oversight, COLLIDE clearly courts the governance and risk side of enterprise AI, not just the build side.

Solution and service providers: Vendors selling data and AI platforms, infrastructure, and services attend to meet enterprise buyers. The exhibit hall and sponsorship tiers exist for exactly this. Note that the free complimentary pass explicitly excludes vendors, which keeps the buyer-to-seller ratio healthier than at many trade shows.

If you are an SMB owner, a solo founder, or an early-career analyst, this is probably not your event. The value here is peer-level access to enterprise decision-makers. For smaller teams, the best AI tools for business and lifetime deal coverage I publish will stretch further than a Fortune 500 networking pass.

When and Where Is COLLIDE 2026?

The COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026 takes place on Thursday, October 1, 2026 at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center in Sandy Springs, Georgia, less than 15 miles from Midtown Atlanta. The Eventbrite listing shows event hours of roughly 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., making this a focused single-day program rather than a multi-day marathon.

The venue choice matters more than it looks. Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center opened in 2018 and was built as a performance and conference space, not a generic convention hall. It features two large theaters with strong acoustics and lighting, plus spacious atrium-style exhibitor halls. For a conference built around keynotes, panels, and an exhibit floor, a purpose-built performance venue tends to produce a noticeably better session experience than a windowless convention center ballroom.

The location also leans into Atlanta’s growing position as a data and AI hub in the US South. The venue sits inside a four-acre city park surrounded by restaurants, retail, and hotels, part of one of Metro Atlanta’s live-work-play developments. That makes the logistics of a one-day trip manageable: fly into Hartsfield-Jackson, stay nearby, and you are not fighting downtown traffic to reach the venue.

Getting There and Planning Your Trip

A few practical notes for planning the trip, since COLLIDE provides a “Plan Your Trip” section but the basics are worth stating plainly.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is one of the busiest in the world, which means cheap, frequent flights from almost anywhere in North America. That accessibility is a real advantage for a one-day event: many attendees can fly in the night before and out the same evening without a second hotel night. Sandy Springs sits north of the airport, so budget for cross-city transit time during Atlanta rush hour.

Because COLLIDE is a single day, the trip math is simpler than a three-day conference. Your real cost is one or two hotel nights, airfare, and the pass. If you are coming from within driving distance in the Southeast, COLLIDE becomes a same-day trip with no lodging cost at all, which is part of why a regional enterprise audience finds it easy to attend. If you are weighing which 2026 AI events are worth the travel budget, I keep notes on the ones that actually deliver in my ongoing AI tools and industry coverage.

COLLIDE 2026 Theme and Content Pillars

The 2026 theme is “AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production,” and it is the most important thing to understand about the event. The organizers state their point of view directly: enterprise AI is no longer a model conversation. It is a systems, governance, and value conversation. In 2026, the hard part is not accessing models or running experiments. It is building AI systems that are scalable, governed, secure, and tied to real business outcomes.

That framing is backed by where the broader industry actually is. Most large organizations have run AI pilots; far fewer have moved them into reliable production. Research from McKinsey’s State of AI work has repeatedly shown that scaling AI from experiment to enterprise value is where most of the difficulty and most of the unrealized return sits. COLLIDE 2026 is built around that exact gap.

The program organizes around four content pillars, with a wide set of topics underneath. Here is what each emphasis means in practice for an enterprise team.

Pillar 1: AI as a System

The first pillar argues that enterprise AI is no longer about deploying a model, it is about operating a system. That means evaluation, observability, context management, release discipline, and resilience over time. The agenda explicitly covers the move from classic retrieval-augmented generation toward broader context engineering that incorporates retrieval, orchestration, tool use, and emerging protocols such as MCP within a larger enterprise architecture.

The key discussion points listed for this pillar include context engineering beyond classic RAG, evaluation and observability for AI system reliability, LLMOps and GenAIOps for production environments, treating agents as systems rather than features, and enterprise knowledge architecture for grounded AI. If your team is past the demo stage and fighting reliability problems in production, this is the pillar that will earn back the pass cost.

The Full Topic Map

Beyond the headline pillars, COLLIDE 2026 lists a broad set of topics that map to the real concerns of an enterprise data and AI organization:

• AI Systems and Application Layer: how AI capabilities get built into products and workflows.
• AI Engineering, LLMOps, and Evaluation: the operational discipline of shipping and maintaining AI in production.
• Data Foundations and Engineering: the unglamorous data work that determines whether any AI initiative succeeds.
• Knowledge and Retrieval Systems: grounding AI in enterprise knowledge so outputs are accurate and trusted.
• AI Infrastructure and Performance: the compute, latency, and cost realities of running AI at scale.
• Governance, Risk, and Security: arguably the defining enterprise topic of 2026, given the speaker lineup’s heavy governance presence.
• AI Economics and Optimization: measuring ROI and controlling the cost of AI workloads.
• Platform Strategy and Integration: build-versus-buy and how AI fits the existing stack.
• Enterprise Adoption and Operating Model: the organizational change required to make AI stick.

The breadth here is deliberate. An enterprise AI program touches engineering, data, security, legal, and finance, and the topic map reflects that cross-functional reality rather than pretending AI is purely a technical problem.

COLLIDE 2026 Featured Speakers

The speaker lineup is where COLLIDE’s enterprise positioning becomes concrete. The 2026 roster features more than 20 named data and AI decision-makers from major enterprises, with more announced closer to the event. These are operators running data and AI at scale, not professional conference circuit speakers.

A few of the featured names and roles announced for 2026:

• Sergey Fogelson, VP, Head of Data Science at Televisa Univision
• Anqi Zou, SVP, Head of Fair and Responsible Banking Analytics at Truist
• Ricardo Gonzalez, Director, Data Governance Platforms at Coca-Cola
• Ram Kumar, Sr. Director, Networks, Automation and Analytics at AT&T
• Pavan Emani, SVP Engineering Leader, Gen AI and ML
• Jyoti Mohapatra, General Manager, Data and AI Architecture
• Charity Burroughs, VP, Data Governance and Quality Oversight Leader
• Danny Portman, Head of AI Engineering, VP Data Science
• Jacob Kosoff, Executive, Data Science and Model Development
• April Halm, Sr. Director, Data Privacy

The rest of the announced lineup includes Kartik Pillai, Abdullah Bokhari, Malathi Bandlamudi, Sameer Goyal, Nathan Ghadirifard, Keyur Vyas, Kishen Jayanti, Debasis Acharya, Rajiv Cooray, and Amit Panalkar, spanning data engineering, analytics, data fabric, MDM, and AI strategy roles.

Notice the pattern in the titles. There is a heavy concentration of governance, responsible AI, privacy, and quality oversight roles alongside the engineering and data science leaders. That tells you what COLLIDE 2026 actually cares about: not just building AI, but building it responsibly at scale. For anyone whose job involves convincing a risk or compliance function to approve an AI deployment, hearing how peers at banks and Fortune 500 brands handle that is genuinely useful.

The most valuable thing at an enterprise AI conference is not the keynote. It is the hallway conversation with someone who already shipped the thing you are about to attempt, and can tell you where it broke. - Alston Antony

COLLIDE 2026 Passes and Pricing

COLLIDE 2026 offers three pass types, and the pricing structure rewards both early registration and qualified enterprise buyers. Here is the current breakdown, verified directly from the event site.

Pass	Price	Who it’s for
All-Access Pass (in-person)	$499 early bird (regular $999)	Anyone who wants guaranteed in-person access without an application
Complimentary Pass (in-person)	Free ($999 value)	Qualified non-vendor enterprise leaders, by application
Media Pass	Free	Qualified journalists, influencers, and media professionals

The all-access pass at $499 is the no-friction option. You skip the application process and secure in-person access by registering with the early-bird discount, which is half the $999 regular price. The pass includes all general and breakout sessions, presentations and panels, breakfasts and lunches and networking receptions, the exhibit hall, and a private networking app. For a vendor or a leader who does not meet the free criteria, this is the path.

The complimentary pass is the genuinely interesting option. It is free, valued at $999, and highly limited. To qualify you must meet all three criteria: your company is not a vendor and has no sales interest in end-users of data or AI products and services, you work at a non-vendor organization with 250 or more employees, and you hold a senior-level executive or technical position. You complete a registration form and the team reviews whether you are selected. If you run data or AI at a large non-vendor enterprise, applying for the free pass before buying anything is the obvious move.

The media pass is free for journalists, influencers, and media professionals actively reporting on AI and data topics. Acceptance is selective and reviewed by the team.

A practical note on the economics. The free complimentary pass and the vendor exclusion are doing real work here. By giving qualified enterprise buyers free access while charging vendors, COLLIDE keeps its buyer-to-seller ratio in the buyers’ favor. That is good for attendees who came to learn from peers and bad for nobody except vendors hoping for a cheap room full of prospects. If you qualify for the free pass, apply early, because the complimentary allocation is described as highly limited and selective.

Is COLLIDE 2026 Worth the Cost?

For the right attendee, yes, and the math is straightforward. If you qualify for the free pass, the only cost is travel, which makes attending a near-automatic decision for any enterprise data or AI leader in the Southeast. The downside risk is one day and a flight.

If you are paying the $499 early-bird rate, the value depends on your goal. For peer benchmarking and a concentrated day of enterprise-grade governance and production-AI content, $499 is reasonable against a single day. For a vendor, the calculation is about pipeline, and the exhibit hall and networking app are the tools to justify it. The one group I would caution is anyone hoping for deep hands-on technical training. COLLIDE is a strategy, governance, and networking event, not a workshop where you leave with new code.

Who Organizes COLLIDE, and the Broader 2026 Series

COLLIDE is organized by Data Science Connect, a company that runs a circuit of enterprise data and AI events and an Atlanta-area data science community. COLLIDE is its Atlanta flagship trade show, but it is part of a larger 2026 calendar worth knowing about if you are mapping out which events to attend.

Data Science Connect’s 2026 series also includes the ALIGN AI Executive Summits, a set of invite-style executive events across multiple US cities including Atlanta, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas, plus an AI Enterprise Conference in New York. The ALIGN summits are smaller, more executive-roundtable in format, while COLLIDE is the larger trade-show-style gathering. If COLLIDE’s date does not work, one of the ALIGN summits in another city might.

The credibility signal here is the repeat-attendance pattern. Past COLLIDE attendees and sponsors include names like Verizon, Axcelis Technologies, Teleperformance, and data platform vendors such as Coginiti, Plotly, and Tecton, several of whom describe coming back year over year. For an enterprise event, that repeat rate from both buyers and sponsors is the metric that matters more than any marketing claim about being the largest show in the South.

Sponsors and the Exhibit Hall

COLLIDE 2026 runs a tiered sponsorship model, with 2025 sponsors organized into Presenting, Diamond, Platinum, and Gold levels plus media partners. For vendors, the exhibit hall and sponsorship tiers are the reason to be there, and the vendor-excludes-free-pass policy means the enterprise buyers in the room are genuinely buyers, not other vendors.

If you sell data or AI platforms, infrastructure, or services into the enterprise, the value proposition is access to a concentrated room of senior decision-makers from large organizations in a single day. Data Science Connect offers a sponsor kit on request and runs the sponsorship and exhibit program directly. The atrium-style exhibitor halls at the Sandy Springs venue are purpose-built for this, which beats the usual experience of a back-corner booth in a convention center.

For enterprise attendees, the exhibit hall is worth treating strategically rather than avoiding. A single day with most of the relevant data and AI platform vendors in one room is an efficient way to run early-stage vendor evaluation conversations you would otherwise spread across weeks of calls. Go in with a short list of questions and you can compress a lot of procurement legwork into a few hallway conversations.

How to Register for COLLIDE 2026

Registration runs through the official event site, and the path depends on which pass you are after. Here is the practical sequence.

1. Decide which pass fits. If you work at a non-vendor enterprise with 250+ employees in a senior role, start with the free complimentary pass application. If you are a vendor or do not meet the criteria, go straight to the $499 all-access pass. If you are media, use the media pass application.
2. For the all-access pass, register directly and pay the early-bird rate to lock in $499 before it returns to $999. There is no application or waiting period.
3. For the complimentary or media pass, complete the application form. The Data Science Connect team reviews applications and follows up to confirm whether you have been selected, since both free pass types are limited and selective.
4. Book travel once confirmed. Because COLLIDE is a single day, hold off on non-refundable travel until your free pass is approved if you are applying for one.

The early-bird pricing is the main time pressure. The $499 rate is explicitly a discount off the $999 regular price, so the cost of waiting is real if you already know you are attending. For the free passes, the pressure is allocation rather than price: limited spots, reviewed on a rolling basis, so earlier applications have better odds. Want a heads-up on which AI events and tools are actually worth your time in 2026? Get the rundown in my weekly AI deals and industry brief, where every pick comes with a straight recommendation, no hype.

How COLLIDE 2026 Compares to Other AI Conferences

COLLIDE occupies a specific slot in the 2026 conference calendar, and understanding that slot helps you decide whether it is the right event for you versus the alternatives.

Against giant developer-and-AI events like DeveloperWeek or the big cloud-vendor conferences, COLLIDE is smaller, more senior, and more enterprise-strategy focused. You will not find a 1,000-person hackathon or hands-on coding labs. You will find a concentrated room of decision-makers and a governance-heavy agenda. That trade-off is the whole point: depth of peer access over breadth of technical content.

Against pure executive roundtable formats, including Data Science Connect’s own ALIGN summits, COLLIDE is larger and adds a real exhibit hall and trade-show element. So it sits in the middle: more senior and strategic than a developer conference, more open and vendor-inclusive than an invite-only executive dinner. For an enterprise data or AI leader who wants both peer benchmarking and a look at the vendor landscape in one day, that middle position is genuinely useful. For a practitioner who wants to learn a new framework hands-on, a developer-focused event is the better spend, and the AI tools and deals I track will cover the tools that come out of those events anyway.

Final Verdict: Should You Attend COLLIDE 2026?

Attend if you lead data or AI at a large enterprise and you want a high-density day of peer benchmarking on the exact problem most teams are stuck on in 2026: moving AI from pilots to production without losing control of governance, security, and cost. The speaker lineup of VP and director-level leaders from companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, Truist, and Televisa Univision is the draw, and the structured roundtables and dinners are where the real value lives. You leave with a wider network of enterprise decision-makers and a clear read on the trends and innovation shaping how large companies actually ship AI. If you qualify for the free complimentary pass, the decision is close to automatic, since your only cost is a flight and a day.

Think harder if you are an individual contributor, a small-business owner, or anyone hoping for hands-on technical training. COLLIDE is a strategy, governance, and networking event by design, and its value scales with your seniority and your need to talk to enterprise peers. The $499 pass is fair for what it is, but it is not a workshop pass.

Here is the one insight that is not on the registration page: the format is the product. A single-day, senior, vendor-balanced room in a purpose-built venue is engineered to maximize useful conversations per hour, which is exactly what time-poor enterprise leaders need. Your concrete first step today is simple: check whether you meet the three free-pass criteria, and if you do, submit the complimentary pass application before the limited allocation fills. If you do not qualify, lock in the $499 early-bird rate before it returns to $999.

Want to keep up with the AI events, tools, and deals worth your budget in 2026? Browse our tested AI tools and deals, where every recommendation gets an honest buy, wait, or skip.

Based in the Northeast or working in financial services? Our AI Enterprise Conference 2026 guide covers the New York sibling of this event on September 1, with a finance-heavy speaker lineup from Citi, QBE, and Broadridge.

Want the senior, invite-only version instead of a trade show? Our ALIGN AI Executive Summit NYC guide covers the exclusive executive summit at City Winery NYC on June 25.

Frequently Asked Questions About COLLIDE 2026

When and where is the COLLIDE Data + AI Conference 2026?

COLLIDE 2026 takes place on Thursday, October 1, 2026 at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center in Sandy Springs, Georgia, less than 15 miles from Midtown Atlanta. It is a single-day, in-person event running roughly 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. according to the Eventbrite listing.

How much does it cost to attend COLLIDE 2026?

The all-access in-person pass is $499 with the early-bird discount, down from a regular price of $999. There is also a free complimentary pass valued at $999 for qualified non-vendor enterprise leaders, and a free media pass for qualified journalists and influencers. Both free passes require an application and are selective.

Who can get a free pass to COLLIDE 2026?

To qualify for the free complimentary pass, you must meet all three criteria: your company is not a vendor with sales interest in data or AI end-users, you work at a non-vendor organization with 250 or more employees, and you hold a senior-level executive or technical position. Media professionals reporting on AI and data can apply separately for a free media pass.

Who are the speakers at COLLIDE 2026?

The 2026 lineup features more than 20 enterprise data and AI leaders, including Sergey Fogelson (Televisa Univision), Anqi Zou (Truist), Ricardo Gonzalez (Coca-Cola), and Ram Kumar (AT&T), alongside VP, SVP, and director-level leaders in data science, AI engineering, governance, and privacy. More speakers are announced closer to the event.

Who organizes the COLLIDE Data + AI Conference?

COLLIDE is organized by Data Science Connect, which also runs the ALIGN AI Executive Summits across several US cities and an AI Enterprise Conference in New York. COLLIDE is its Atlanta flagship data and AI trade show.

What is the theme of COLLIDE 2026?

The 2026 theme is “AI for Enterprise: From Pilots to Production.” The program focuses on operationalizing AI at scale, with content pillars covering AI as a system, AI engineering and LLMOps, data foundations, knowledge and retrieval systems, infrastructure, governance and security, AI economics, platform strategy, and enterprise adoption.

Is COLLIDE 2026 worth attending?

For senior enterprise data and AI leaders, yes, especially if you qualify for the free pass and your only cost is travel. The value is peer benchmarking and a governance-heavy, production-focused agenda. It is less suited to individual contributors or anyone seeking hands-on technical training, since it is a strategy and networking event rather than a workshop.