The Best AI Conferences to Attend in 2026
AI engineering teams in 2026 face a practical challenge: choosing conferences that deliver actionable insights for building production AI systems. With dozens of events scheduled throughout the year, selecting the right conferences requires matching your technical role and current challenges with event programming and speaker expertise.
This guide identifies the top AI conferences for 2026 based on technical depth, practitioner focus, and relevance for teams shipping AI applications.
Selecting Conferences Based on Your Technical Role
Conference effectiveness depends on alignment between your responsibilities and the event's technical focus. AI engineers benefit most from conferences featuring code demonstrations, architecture discussions, and production debugging sessions. Product managers should prioritize events addressing AI quality evaluation, cross-functional workflows, and systematic measurement approaches.
Technical leaders need conferences covering infrastructure decisions, platform evaluations, and organizational scaling patterns. Teams building AI agents should understand comprehensive evaluation frameworks before attending conferences, as this context helps identify sessions addressing specific quality challenges.
2026 AI Conference Calendar
| Event | Dates | Location |
|---|---|---|
| CES 2026 | January 6-10, 2026 | Las Vegas |
| World AI Cannes | February 12-13, 2026 | Cannes, France |
| MIT Sloan Product, Tech & AI Conference | February 13-14, 2026 | Cambridge, MA |
| AI DevWorld | February 18-20, 2026 | San Jose |
| DeveloperWeek 2026 | February 18-20, 2026 | San Jose |
| Gartner Data & Analytics Summit | March 9-12, 2026 | Orlando, FL |
| Enterprise Connect | March 10-13, 2026 | Las Vegas |
| SXSW | March 12-21, 2026 | Austin |
| NVIDIA GTC | March 16-19, 2026 | San Jose |
| ICMLAIDS 2026 | March 20-21, 2026 | TBA |
| HumanX 2026 | April 6-9, 2026 | San Francisco |
| AI Week | April 20-26, 2026 | Virtual & Nationwide |
| AI Summit 2026 | April 21-22, 2026 | Madison, WI |
| Google Cloud NEXT | April 22-24, 2026 | Las Vegas |
| ODSC AI East 2026 | April 28-30, 2026 | Boston |
| AI Agent Conference | May 4-5, 2026 | New York |
| IBM Think 2026 | May 4-7, 2026 | Boston |
| Data Council AI | May 12-14, 2026 | San Francisco |
| AI & Big Data Expo NA | May 18-19, 2026 | San Jose |
| AI DevSummit | May 27-28, 2026 | South San Francisco |
| AI Con USA | June 7-10, 2026 | Seattle |
| Data + AI Summit | June 15-18, 2026 | San Francisco |
| PlatformCon 2026 | June 22-26, 2026 | NYC/London/Paris |
| AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 | June 30-July 2, 2026 | San Francisco |
| Ai4 2026 | August 4-6, 2026 | Las Vegas |
| ALIGN AI Summit SF | August 19, 2026 | San Francisco |
| The AI Enterprise Conference | September 2, 2026 | New York |
| AI Conference 2026 | September 30-October 1, 2026 | San Francisco |
NVIDIA GTC
Date: March 16-19, 2026
Location: San Jose
Register: https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/
NVIDIA GTC delivers technical depth on AI infrastructure, accelerated computing, and production optimization. The conference features hands-on workshops on CUDA optimization, model inference at scale, and the Vera Rubin architecture rollout following the Blackwell Ultra upgrade. GTC provides direct access to NVIDIA engineers and technical sessions on performance tuning that directly impact production costs. Teams working on inference optimization, model deployment infrastructure, or GPU-accelerated workloads benefit from the conference's focus on compute architecture and optimization patterns.
AI Engineer World's Fair
Date: June 30-July 2, 2026
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco
Register: https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair
The AI Engineer World's Fair focuses on practitioners building and shipping AI applications, with 20 technical tracks, 6,000 attendees, and 250 speakers. The conference addresses agent reliability, evaluation frameworks, and production patterns through code-level discussions where engineers demonstrate actual implementations and share production failures. Sessions cover RAG architectures, agent orchestration, and systematic evaluation approaches. Organizations implementing agent simulation and evaluation workflows find value in the conference's focus on production quality measurement and real-world debugging patterns.
Data Council AI
Date: May 12-14, 2026
Location: San Francisco
Register: https://www.datacouncil.ai/data-council-2026
Data Council AI serves as the premier vendor-neutral conference for data engineering and AI infrastructure, featuring 2,000+ practitioners discussing battle-tested architectures and production data systems. The conference emphasizes data infrastructure underlying AI applications, covering data quality, pipeline reliability, and governance at scale. Speakers include creators of major open-source data tools and architects managing billion-parameter inference systems. Teams struggling with data quality issues or building robust observability systems benefit from the conference's focus on production data infrastructure and engineering fundamentals.
HumanX 2026
Date: April 6-9, 2026
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco
Register: https://www.humanx.com/
HumanX focuses on practical AI execution including end-to-end system design, evaluation frameworks, and production deployment. The conference features ROI labs, vendor selection frameworks, and workshops on agent evaluation methodologies. Product managers benefit from sessions demonstrating how to establish evaluation criteria, implement human-in-the-loop feedback, and measure AI quality systematically. Understanding AI agent evaluation metrics provides context for maximizing value from HumanX sessions on quality measurement and production deployment patterns.
Data + AI Summit
Date: June 15-18, 2026
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco
Register: https://www.databricks.com/dataaisummit
Databricks' Data + AI Summit delivers 700+ sessions covering the complete AI lifecycle from data infrastructure through production deployment. The conference features keynotes from industry leaders including Ali Ghodsi, Jamie Dimon, Satya Nadella, Dario Amodei, and Thomas Kurian, along with real-world case studies from organizations like Walmart, Rivian, T-Mobile, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. Technical tracks cover Unity Catalog, MLOps patterns, and production observability. Teams evaluating platforms for experimentation and prompt engineering gain insights from Summit sessions on production workflows and enterprise AI implementation at scale.
Ai4 2026
Date: August 4-6, 2026
Location: The Venetian, Las Vegas
Register: https://ai4.io/
Ai4 2026 features 20 industry-specific tracks covering AI applications across financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, retail, manufacturing, energy, transportation, national security, insurance, and media. The conference hosts 12,000 projected attendees, 1,000 speakers, and 400 exhibitors. Industry-focused sessions demonstrate real deployments with measurable results, addressing domain-specific challenges including regulatory compliance, data privacy, and operational integration. Organizations from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Databricks, and major enterprises share production experiences. Super early registration offers a 56% discount off final ticket prices through February 5, 2026.
AI Agent Conference
Date: May 4-5, 2026
Location: New York
Register: https://www.aiagentconference.com/
The AI Agent Conference focuses specifically on autonomous AI architectures and enterprise agent deployments. The two-day summit convenes executives, AI engineers, and product leaders to explore agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and production patterns. Sessions feature leaders from Fortune 500 companies including Citi, Eli Lilly, Anyscale, and Bloomberg discussing real agent deployments, architectural decisions, and quality measurement approaches. The conference addresses practical challenges of building reliable agent systems with focus on production deployment patterns and systematic evaluation.
ODSC AI East 2026
Date: April 28-30, 2026
Location: Boston (Hynes Convention Center and BCEC)
Register: https://odsc.com/boston/
ODSC AI East provides comprehensive technical training on GenAI, agentic AI, and MLOps for East Coast teams. The conference features hands-on workshops, technical deep dives, and an AI Mini-Bootcamp covering RAG implementations, agentic AI, workflow automation, AI engineering, and MLOps. Programming includes keynotes, panels, workshops, roundtables, startup showcases, and networking sessions for builders and leaders. Passes range from free Expo access to discounted 1- and 3-day Business passes under "First 100" pricing, making technical training accessible for budget-conscious teams.
IBM Think 2026
Date: May 4-7, 2026
Location: Thomas M. Menino Convention and Exhibition Center, Boston
Register: https://www.ibm.com/events/think
IBM Think addresses enterprise AI adoption, hybrid cloud strategies, and agentic AI frameworks. The conference features industry, business, and tech pioneers sharing actionable insights and AI expertise focused on maximizing investment in AI and emerging technologies. Programming emphasizes enterprise AI implementation, hybrid cloud integration, and complex system modernization challenges. The conference includes an exclusive, invitation-only program for senior executives and serves organizations dealing with legacy system integration and enterprise-scale AI deployment.
MIT Sloan Product, Tech & AI Conference
Date: February 13-14, 2026
Location: Samberg Conference Center, Cambridge, MA
Register: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/events/2026-02-13-mit-sloan-product-tech-and-ai-conference
The MIT Sloan conference connects product leaders, innovators, and professionals from top tech companies and high-growth startups through panel discussions, keynotes, and interactive sessions. Past speakers have included leaders from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Coursera. The student-led format focuses on practical challenges rather than vendor pitches, addressing how product teams translate AI capabilities into shippable features. The February timing helps teams finalize roadmaps while incorporating insights on AI product development workflows.
Gartner Data & Analytics Summit
Date: March 9-12, 2026
Location: Orlando, FL
Register: https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/na/data-analytics-us
Gartner Data & Analytics Summit delivers research-driven insights for CDAOs and AI leaders. The summit covers AI/Gen AI and agentic systems, business value and ROI, governance including risk, privacy, and ethics, data architecture and ecosystems, and leadership/org design. Attendees use the Conference Navigator to build agendas, join roundtables and workshops, schedule one-on-ones with 60+ Gartner experts, and explore the Exhibit Showcase with 150+ solution providers. The research-backed approach provides data and frameworks for building business cases and aligning executive stakeholders on AI initiatives.
Google Cloud NEXT
Date: April 22-24, 2026
Location: Las Vegas
Register: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next
Google Cloud NEXT features product announcements, technical sessions, and hands-on training. The conference covers session agendas, workshops, demos, and user research programs addressing security, multicloud, sustainability, and enterprise case studies. Content includes Vertex AI, Gemini integration, and Google's AI infrastructure approach. Teams working in the Google Cloud ecosystem or evaluating cloud platforms for AI workloads benefit from sessions demonstrating how enterprises use Google's AI stack in production environments.
Building Production-Ready AI Systems
Conference learnings become valuable when applied to production systems. Teams shipping AI applications need platforms supporting experimentation, evaluation, and observability throughout the development lifecycle.
Maxim AI provides an end-to-end platform for AI simulation, evaluation, and observability, helping teams ship reliable AI agents more than 5x faster. The platform addresses practical challenges discussed at conferences through simulation capabilities that test AI agents across hundreds of scenarios before production deployment, unified evaluation frameworks combining machine and human evaluations for comprehensive quality measurement, production observability enabling real-time monitoring and quality assessment of live AI applications, and data management for curating and enriching datasets used in evaluation and fine-tuning.
Organizations building AI agents need systematic approaches to quality measurement and continuous improvement. Maxim's platform enables the evaluation workflows and observability patterns discussed at leading AI conferences.
Start Building Better AI Applications
AI conferences provide learning opportunities, but production success requires robust tooling and systematic evaluation frameworks. Schedule a demo to learn how Maxim's evaluation and observability platform helps teams build production-ready AI systems, or sign up today to start improving your AI quality workflows.
Meta Description: Discover the best AI conferences for 2026 including NVIDIA GTC, AI Engineer World's Fair, and Data + AI Summit. Essential guide for AI engineers, PMs, and ML developers.