The AI Conference 2026: Dates, Speakers & Tickets
September 29 - October 1, 2026
TL;DR: The AI Conference 2026 runs September 29 to October 1, 2026 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, an in-person only event expecting 5,500-plus builders, researchers, and AI leaders across 5 tracks and 120-plus...
TL;DR: The AI Conference 2026 runs September 29 to October 1, 2026 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, an in-person only event expecting 5,500-plus builders, researchers, and AI leaders across 5 tracks and 120-plus speakers. Confirmed names include Peter Norvig, Illia Polosukhin, Chris Lattner, and Sergey Levine, alongside a Startup Showdown and an optional Day ZERO add-on. Ticket tiers exist (Day ZERO, Full Conference, Team Tickets), but the organizers do not publish exact dollar figures on the site, only a “$1,600 off” promotional banner, so budget with that gap in mind.
Most AI conferences in 2026 are chasing the same three buzzwords: agentic, frontier, and enterprise. The AI Conference leans into all three at once, and it backs that up with a speaker list that includes the co-author of the original Transformer paper and a Stanford HAI fellow who has been shaping AI research since before “AGI” was a pitch-deck word.
I track AI conferences and launch events for the same reason I track AI tool deals: the workflows debated on a conference stage this quarter tend to show up in team decisions a few months later. The AI Conference caught my attention because it sits at the intersection of research (Anthropic, Google Labs, UC Berkeley) and applied engineering (Netflix, Instacart, Amazon Alexa), which is a rarer combination than most “AI conference” branding suggests.
In this guide, I’ll walk through the verified dates and venue, the confirmed speaker lineup, what the agenda actually covers, what’s known (and not known) about ticket pricing, who this event is genuinely built for, and an honest verdict on whether it’s worth the trip. All figures below come directly from the official AI Conference site and its FAQ page, cross-checked against the confirmed speakers page.
If you only need the short version: this is a large-scale, in-person-only AI conference in San Francisco with a genuinely strong speaker roster and a distinct startup and hack-day layer most competing events don’t offer. The catch is that the organizers keep ticket prices behind a registration click-through, so you won’t find a clean number until you start the checkout flow. Here’s the full breakdown.
Key Takeaways
- Three days, one city, no virtual option. The AI Conference 2026 runs September 29 to October 1 at Pier 48 in San Francisco’s Mission Rock district, and it’s explicitly in-person only. There is no livestream or online pass.
- Scale with a research-grade speaker list. More than 120 speakers across 5 tracks are expected, including Peter Norvig (Stanford HAI), Illia Polosukhin (co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”), and Chris Lattner (Modular).
- An optional pre-conference layer for builders. Day ZERO (September 29) adds 8 workshops, a live AI Hack Day, and a VIP dinner on top of the main 2-day conference, capped at 350 attendees.
- A real startup pitch stage. The Startup Showdown puts emerging AI companies (including Hack Day winners) in front of investors and the broader ecosystem, something most enterprise-heavy AI conferences skip entirely.
- Pricing is genuinely opaque right now. The site advertises “$1,600 off” and a “price increase” countdown, but does not publish a base ticket price anywhere in plain text. Group Team Tickets exist for 2 or more attendees, and refunds are available up to 30 days out minus a 5% fee.
A speaker list with the co-author of “Attention Is All You Need” on it is not a conference that needs hype copy. It’s a conference that should just show its ticket prices.
What Is The AI Conference?
The AI Conference is a large-format, in-person AI event held annually in San Francisco, and the 2026 edition is built around applied AI, agentic systems, and frontier research rather than a single narrow theme. It runs across 3 main programming days (with an optional fourth pre-day) and is organized into 5 tracks: AI Frontiers, AI Builders, The AI Stack, Applied AI, and AI Strategy.
The organizers position it as exploring “Agentic AI, AGI, frontier models, infrastructure, security, governance, evaluation, AI startups, emerging architectures, and real-world enterprise applications,” according to the official event site. That range shows up in the speaker mix. Peter Norvig represents the research and education side from Stanford HAI, Illia Polosukhin brings direct authorship of the paper that started the modern transformer era at NEAR AI, and engineers from Netflix, Instacart, and Amazon Alexa are speaking on the applied side.
What separates this from a typical vendor-heavy AI expo is the startup layer. The event runs a live AI Hack Day where teams build a real, demoable product in a single day, with the winning team pitching to VCs on the main stage at the Startup Showdown. That’s a meaningfully different structure than a conference where “startups” just means a sponsor booth row.
Expected attendance sits at 5,500-plus, which puts this firmly in the “major AI conference” tier rather than a boutique event. With 60-plus sponsor companies listed, including AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks, and Microsoft, the vendor presence is real, but the core programming (keynotes at 40 minutes, featured sessions at 20 minutes) is the stated focus, not the expo floor.
When and Where Is The AI Conference 2026?
The AI Conference 2026 takes place September 29 to October 1, 2026, at Pier 48 (Shed A and B), 48 Pier 48, San Francisco, CA 94158, in the Mission Rock waterfront district. It is an in-person only event; the organizers state this directly in the official FAQ, so anyone hoping for a remote or hybrid option should plan the trip instead.
Mission Rock sits along San Francisco’s southern waterfront, near Oracle Park. The venue note worth knowing before you book rideshare: Uber and Lyft cannot drop passengers directly at the building entrance. The official FAQ instructs attendees to use “Tony Stone East” as the Lyft destination and “TechCrunch Disrupt” as the Uber destination, since the venue also hosts other major tech events and the rideshare apps route by venue name rather than event name. Parking details are handled through ParkWhiz, per the same FAQ.
A few practical notes on timing. Late September puts you ahead of the November-December conference crunch and before Bay Area rainy season typically sets in, so flights and hotel availability into SFO tend to be more workable than during peak summer travel. The event structure (an optional Day ZERO on September 29, then two full conference days September 30 to October 1) means you can choose a 2-day trip or a 3-day one depending on whether the pre-conference workshops and hack day matter to you.
Quick facts:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Event | The AI Conference 2026 |
| Dates | September 29 to October 1, 2026 |
| Venue | Pier 48, Shed A and B, San Francisco, CA 94158 (Mission Rock) |
| Format | In-person only; no virtual or hybrid pass |
| Scale | 5,500+ expected attendees, 120+ speakers, 5 tracks |
| Themes | Agentic AI, AGI, frontier models, infrastructure, applied AI, AI strategy, AI startups |
| Official site | aiconference.com |
Who Should Attend The AI Conference 2026?
The AI Conference is built for people building or deploying AI systems in production, not for casual observers of the AI news cycle. The five tracks map directly onto distinct job functions: AI Frontiers for research-adjacent roles, AI Builders and The AI Stack for engineers shipping agentic systems and infrastructure, Applied AI for teams running real deployments, and AI Strategy for leaders managing enterprise adoption and ROI.
You’ll get real value out of this event if you fit one of these profiles:
- ML and infrastructure engineers who want direct exposure to speakers from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cerebras discussing inference, evaluation, and accelerators rather than marketing-department AI talk.
- Founders and early-stage builders who want a genuine shot at the Startup Showdown pitch stage, especially through the AI Hack Day pathway on Day ZERO.
- Engineering and product leaders trying to figure out where agentic AI actually belongs in a product roadmap, covered directly in the AI Builders and AI Strategy tracks.
- Enterprise AI strategy and governance staff who need session content on adoption frameworks and organizational change, not just model benchmarks.
- Anyone weighing Day ZERO who wants a full day of hands-on workshops (Google Cloud Run for agentic apps was confirmed among them) before the main conference starts.
Here’s the honest caveat. This is not a beginner’s introduction to AI. The track list assumes you already know what an agentic system or an inference accelerator is, and the audience skews toward people already shipping AI in production. If you’re new to the space with no hands-on build experience yet, you’ll get more out of foundational courses first and this conference once you have real context to plug the sessions into.
If you’re deciding whether to send your whole team or just yourself, the math comes down to what Day ZERO actually offers. One sensible split: book yourself into Day ZERO for the hands-on workshops and the Hack Day networking, then bring your senior engineers in for the main 2-day conference only, skipping the pre-day for team members who won’t be building anything live. That way your team gets both the deep workshop content and the keynote and track coverage without paying for a capability (the hack day) that only one person plans to use directly.
The AI Conference 2026 Speakers
The confirmed 2026 speaker list draws from a genuinely research-heavy bench alongside applied engineering leaders. The organizers have not released the full 120-plus roster yet; the names below are the currently confirmed speakers pulled directly from the official speakers page.
| Speaker | Title / Company |
|---|---|
| Peter Norvig | Distinguished Education Fellow, Stanford HAI |
| Illia Polosukhin | Co-Founder, NEAR AI (co-author, “Attention Is All You Need”) |
| Chris Lattner | Co-Founder and CEO, Modular |
| Sergey Levine | Associate Professor, UC Berkeley |
| Emmanuel Ameisen | Interpretability Researcher, Anthropic |
| Ryan Lopopolo | Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI |
| Ruiyang Wang | Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic |
| Sarah Chieng | Head of Developer Experience, Cerebras |
| Ioannis Antonoglou | Co-Founder and CTO, Reflection AI |
| Jaclyn Konzelmann | Product Director, Google Labs |
| Julia Diament | Principal AI Architect, Office of the CTO, Microsoft |
| Divya Mahajan | Software Engineer, Amazon Alexa |
| Pratyusha Singaraju | Senior Software Engineer, Netflix |
| Yogiraj Awati | Engineering Manager, Instacart |
| Vidya Meenakshi | Senior Software Engineer, Intuit |
| Pallavi Kinnera | Chip Designer, Meta Reality Labs |
| Marco Paglia | President, Product & Engineering, Musixmatch |
| Jon Pappas | Sr. Director of Technical Product Management, Upwork |
| Shuen Mei | VP, Director of Software and Data Engineering, Harbor Capital Advisors |
Illia Polosukhin’s involvement is the single most notable booking on this list. He is one of the eight co-authors of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underlying essentially every modern large language model, including the ones powering this exact analysis. Having him on stage discussing NEAR AI’s current direction is a rare chance to hear directly from someone at the origin point of the technology the entire conference is built around.
Peter Norvig’s presence adds academic weight from Stanford’s Human-Centered AI institute, while Sergey Levine (robotics and reinforcement learning at UC Berkeley) and Chris Lattner (Modular, previously known for LLVM and Swift) round out a research-and-infrastructure axis that’s genuinely uncommon at conferences skewing toward enterprise sales content. The applied-engineering names, spanning Netflix, Instacart, Amazon Alexa, and Intuit, keep the agenda grounded in production reality rather than pure research theory.
What Does the Agenda Cover?
The AI Conference 2026 agenda spans 5 tracks delivered across the main 2 conference days, with an optional Day ZERO pre-day adding workshop-format programming on top. The five tracks are AI Frontiers (governance, ethics, multimodal and agentic systems), AI Builders (shipping agentic systems and toolchains), The AI Stack (model design, inference, data evaluation, accelerators), Applied AI (real deployments and workflow automation case studies), and AI Strategy (enterprise adoption, governance, ROI frameworks).
That track split matters because it separates “how do I build this” content from “how do I decide whether to build this” content, which most AI conferences blend together into a confusing single stream. Engineers can spend both days in AI Builders and The AI Stack without sitting through ROI-framework talks aimed at VPs, and vice versa.
Day ZERO (September 29) runs separately from the main tracks. It’s an optional add-on capped at 350 attendees, built around 8 workshops split into Technical and Leadership sub-tracks, each running 90 minutes. Confirmed technical content includes a hands-on Google Cloud Run for Agentic Apps workshop covering deployment and MCP servers; the remaining seven workshops were not fully titled as of this writing. Day ZERO also includes the live AI Hack Day, where teams build and ship a genuine, demoable AI product in a single day, competing for a spot presenting to VCs at the Startup Showdown.
The Startup Showdown itself runs during the main conference days and puts emerging AI companies, including the Hack Day’s winning team, in front of investors, partners, and the broader ecosystem. Alongside it, the Innovation Hub functions as an expanded showcase of newer AI tools, platforms, and startups outside the pitch-competition format. Evening programming includes a “Party in the Park” open-air event on September 30 and Ignite Talks that same evening, both included with a standard conference pass.
Presentation formats stay tight across the main program: keynotes run 40 minutes and featured contributor sessions run 20 minutes, which keeps the schedule dense but avoids the hour-long, half-empty keynote problem some AI conferences still have.
The AI Conference 2026 Ticket Pricing
Here’s where I have to be direct instead of helpful: The AI Conference does not publish exact ticket prices in plain text anywhere on its public site. The homepage displays a countdown timer labeled “Price Increase” and a banner reading “GET $1,600 OFF,” but neither the discounted price nor the full price appears until you click into the registration flow. I checked the homepage, the FAQ, and the Day ZERO page directly and none of them list a dollar figure.
What is confirmed: there are three ticket categories.
| Ticket | What’s Included | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Day ZERO | 8 workshops, live AI Hack Day, VIP dinner, plus full 3-day conference pass and early badge pickup | Not publicly listed; check registration flow |
| Full Conference | Main 2-day conference access (September 30 to October 1), keynotes, sessions, Startup Showdown, Innovation Hub | Not publicly listed; check registration flow |
| Team Tickets | Group rate for 2 or more attendees from the same organization; described by organizers as the “lowest cost per person” | Not publicly listed; check registration flow |
Pricing structure confirmed from the official AI Conference site and its FAQ page. Neither page discloses a base or discounted dollar amount as of this writing. Confirm current pricing directly on the official ticket page before budgeting.
I’m not going to fill that table with a guessed number, and you shouldn’t trust any third-party source that quotes one confidently either, since the official organizers themselves haven’t put a figure in plain text. What the FAQ does confirm: attendees can cancel up to 30 days before the event for a full refund, minus a 5% processing fee, by contacting tickets@aiconference.com. Early registration is framed as “the lowest rate available, even beyond any future discounts,” which is standard early-bird logic, just without a number attached to it publicly.
If you’re weighing this against a fixed training or travel budget, the honest move is to start the registration flow far enough to see the real number before you commit to flights and hotel in San Francisco. Don’t book non-refundable travel around a “$1,600 off” banner alone.
Is The AI Conference 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take
For engineers and product leaders working directly with agentic AI, model infrastructure, or enterprise AI deployment, The AI Conference 2026 looks like one of the stronger AI-specific events on the 2026 calendar, mainly because of the speaker bench. A conference that can book Illia Polosukhin, Peter Norvig, and Chris Lattner alongside working engineers from Netflix, Instacart, and Anthropic is offering a genuinely rare mix of research credibility and applied experience.
The honest caveats are about transparency and format, not content quality. Not publishing ticket prices in plain text is a real friction point, especially for anyone trying to get budget approval from a manager who wants a number before you request time off. And the strictly in-person, no-virtual-option format means this event is simply off the table if travel to San Francisco isn’t realistic this year.
Here’s my buy-or-skip framing, the same one I apply to AI tools I’ve personally tested. Buy the Full Conference pass if you can name two speakers or tracks you’d genuinely learn from and the San Francisco trip fits your travel budget. Add Day ZERO if hands-on workshops or the Hack Day and Startup Showdown pipeline matter to your goals, whether that’s learning or actually pitching a project. Skip it (or wait for a cheaper regional alternative) if a hard ticket-price ceiling matters more to you than the speaker list, since you won’t know the real cost until you’re inside the registration flow.
The Research Institutions Behind the 2026 Lineup
One thing that stood out when I dug past the company logos: several confirmed 2026 speakers carry serious academic and research-institution credentials, not just enterprise job titles. That mix is a big part of why I rate this above a typical vendor conference, and it’s also the piece most listings skip. Here’s who is actually behind the names.
What is Stanford HAI, and why does it matter here?
Peter Norvig’s affiliation on the official speakers page reads “Distinguished Education Fellow, Stanford HAI” - the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Per Stanford HAI’s own about page, it’s an interdisciplinary institute established in 2019, co-directed by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, with the stated mission to “advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to improve the human condition.” The official conference site also notes Norvig formerly directed research at Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Opening a commercial AI conference with a Stanford HAI fellow signals the organizers want the human-centered, education, and policy angle in the room, not only model benchmarks and product demos.
Beyond Stanford, the research bench runs deeper than most enterprise-skewed events manage. Sergey Levine is an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley working on robotics and reinforcement learning; Illia Polosukhin co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper before founding NEAR AI; and Anthropic is sending interpretability researcher Emmanuel Ameisen. Line that research axis up next to working engineers from Netflix, Instacart, Intuit, and Amazon Alexa and you get a genuinely rare split of academic depth and production reality on the same badge.
Here’s the honest caveat I’d want before buying, though: an institutional affiliation on a speaker card doesn’t guarantee an academic-depth session. Stanford HAI, UC Berkeley, and the rest are the speakers’ home institutions, not co-organizers or sponsors of this conference. So if Norvig’s education-and-AI research is the specific reason you’re eyeing a ticket, wait for the published session abstract once the full agenda drops and read that, rather than buying on the affiliation line alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is The AI Conference 2026?
The AI Conference 2026 runs September 29 to October 1, 2026, at Pier 48 in San Francisco’s Mission Rock district. It’s an in-person only event with no virtual or hybrid attendance option.
How much do The AI Conference 2026 tickets cost?
The organizers have not published exact prices in plain text. The site advertises a “$1,600 off” promotion and a “price increase” countdown, but you need to enter the registration flow to see actual dollar figures for Day ZERO, Full Conference, or Team Tickets.
Who speaks at The AI Conference 2026?
Confirmed speakers include Peter Norvig (Stanford HAI), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR AI, co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”), Chris Lattner (Modular), Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley), and engineers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Netflix, Instacart, and Amazon Alexa, part of an expected 120-plus total speaker roster.
Is there a virtual or online option?
No. The organizers explicitly state this is an in-person only event, so there is no livestream or online pass available for The AI Conference 2026.
What is Day ZERO?
Day ZERO is an optional pre-conference day on September 29, capped at 350 attendees, that adds 8 workshops, a live AI Hack Day, and a VIP dinner on top of the standard 2-day conference pass.
What is the Startup Showdown?
The Startup Showdown is a live pitch stage during the main conference where emerging AI companies, including the winning team from the Day ZERO AI Hack Day, present to investors, partners, and the broader AI ecosystem.
Are there group discounts?
Yes. Team Tickets offer a group rate for 2 or more attendees from the same organization, described by the organizers as the lowest cost per person available.
What is the refund policy?
Attendees can cancel up to 30 days before the event for a full refund, minus a 5% processing fee, by contacting tickets@aiconference.com.
The Bottom Line
The AI Conference 2026 is doing something a lot of AI conferences claim but don’t deliver: putting genuine research authority (Norvig, Polosukhin, Levine, Lattner) on the same stage as engineers actually shipping AI in production at Netflix, Instacart, and Amazon. Between the 5-track structure, the Day ZERO workshop and hack-day layer, and a real investor-facing Startup Showdown, this is built for people who want technical depth, not another vendor keynote reel.
The insight worth taking with you: Illia Polosukhin’s booking alone is worth weighing heavily. Watching a recorded keynote later is easy. Hearing directly from one of the researchers who co-authored the paper that started the modern LLM era, in the same room as the engineers now deploying that architecture at scale, is the part a replay can’t replicate.
Your concrete next step for The AI Conference 2026: check the official event site for current registration pricing before you book flights, since the exact ticket cost only appears once you start the checkout flow. While you’re planning the trip, browse the AI tools I’ve tested for technical teams so the agentic AI and infrastructure sessions land with more context, and subscribe for AI event and deal alerts if you want a heads-up the next time pricing or speaker updates drop for this event.