The Best AI Conferences to Attend in 2026

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.