The AI Conference 2026: Dates, Speakers & Tickets

The AI Conference 2026 runs September 29 to October 1, 2026 at Pier 48 in San Francisco’s Mission Rock district. The in-person-only program packs 120-plus speakers across five tracks (AI Frontiers, AI Builders, The AI Stack, Applied AI, AI Strategy) with an expected 5,500-plus attendees (checked 2026-08-24, aiconference.com). The organizer does not publish ticket prices in plain text; the site shows a “$1,600 off” banner and a countdown, and the real number only appears inside the registration flow.

Most AI conferences in 2026 chase the same three buzzwords: agentic, frontier, and enterprise. The AI Conference leans into all three and backs that up with a bench most vendor events cannot match. I track AI events the same way I track AI tools: the workflows argued on stage this quarter show up in team decisions the next quarter.

Illia Polosukhin on stage is the single most useful reason to buy

Polosukhin co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer, which is the architecture underneath every modern LLM including the one drafting this post. Getting him in a working room to discuss what he is building at NEAR AI is not a keynote you replay from a hotel bed later. Peter Norvig from Stanford HAI, Sergey Levine from UC Berkeley, and Chris Lattner from Modular sit on the same axis. Applied engineers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Netflix, Instacart, Intuit, and Amazon Alexa fill out the room. That specific mix, research authority next to production engineers, is what earns the trip.

What the five tracks separate that other conferences merge

AI Frontiers covers governance, multimodal, agentic systems. AI Builders and The AI Stack cover shipping agents, evaluation, inference, accelerators. Applied AI covers real deployments and workflow automation. AI Strategy covers enterprise adoption, governance, ROI frameworks. The split matters because engineers can spend both days in Builders + Stack without sitting through VP-facing ROI sessions, and strategy leaders can skip the accelerator content that will not change their roadmap. Keynotes run 40 minutes, featured contributor sessions run 20 minutes, so the schedule stays dense and the half-empty-keynote problem does not happen.

Confirmed speakers

Speaker	Title, company
Peter Norvig	Distinguished Education Fellow, Stanford HAI
Illia Polosukhin	Co-founder, NEAR AI (Transformer paper co-author)
Chris Lattner	Co-founder and CEO, Modular
Sergey Levine	Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Ioannis Antonoglou	Co-founder and CTO, Reflection AI
Jaclyn Konzelmann	Product Director, Google Labs
Emmanuel Ameisen	Interpretability Researcher, Anthropic
Sarah Chieng	Head of Developer Experience, Cerebras

The rest of the 120-plus roster is not fully public yet. What is confirmed (checked 2026-08-24, aiconference.com/speakers) includes engineers from Netflix, Instacart, Intuit, Amazon Alexa, Meta Reality Labs, Musixmatch, Upwork, and Microsoft, plus Anthropic and OpenAI Members of Technical Staff.

Day ZERO is a separate purchase decision from the main conference

Day ZERO on September 29 is an optional pre-day capped at 350 attendees. It stacks 8 workshops (split into Technical and Leadership sub-tracks), a live AI Hack Day, and a VIP dinner on top of the standard two-day conference pass. The confirmed technical workshop is a hands-on Google Cloud Run for agentic apps session covering deployment and MCP servers. The remaining seven workshops were not titled at the time of writing. The Hack Day matters because the winning team pitches at the Startup Showdown during the main conference days, so Day ZERO is also a real path onto the pitch stage, not just a training add-on.

I would buy Day ZERO if you are pitching an early-stage AI company, or if you learn better from a live-build workshop than from a session recording. I would skip Day ZERO if you are attending as an enterprise buyer whose only goal is speaker coverage on the main tracks.

Pricing is genuinely opaque and that changes how you should plan

You cannot get the ticket number from the homepage, the FAQ, or the Day ZERO page. The site shows “$1,600 off” and a “price increase” countdown, and the real prices only appear once you start the registration flow. Three tiers exist: Day ZERO (main pass plus workshops, hack day, VIP dinner), Full Conference (main two-day pass), and Team Tickets (group rate for two or more from the same organization, described as the lowest cost per person). Refunds are available up to 30 days out minus a 5% processing fee, per the official FAQ.

The honest move is to start the registration flow far enough to see the actual number before you book San Francisco flights and hotel. Do not budget around the “$1,600 off” banner alone. If a third-party guide quotes you a confident dollar figure for a Full Conference pass, that guide is guessing, because the organizer has not published one.

Practical venue detail people miss

Pier 48 sits along the Mission Rock waterfront near Oracle Park. The venue detail worth knowing before you book rideshare: Uber and Lyft do not route by event name. The official FAQ instructs attendees to use “Tony Stone East” as the Lyft destination and “TechCrunch Disrupt” as the Uber destination, because the pier hosts multiple tech events and the apps drop by venue landmark. Parking runs through ParkWhiz. Late September avoids the November to December Bay Area conference crunch and lands before the rainy season, so SFO travel tends to be easier than during peak summer.

Who this is for and who should skip

You get real value if you build or deploy agentic AI in production, if you lead engineering or product on an AI roadmap, if you are an early-stage founder aiming at the Startup Showdown, or if you are running enterprise AI governance. The Applied AI and AI Strategy tracks are built for you.

You should skip this year if you are new to AI with no hands-on build experience yet. The tracks assume you already know what an agentic system is, what inference throughput trades against, and where evaluation fits. Foundational courses first, then this conference next year with real context to plug the sessions into.

For The AI Conference 2027

The 2027 edition is not announced. The Bay Area cadence, if it holds, points to another late September window in San Francisco. If you attended 2026 and want to prep for 2027, watch the aiconference.com homepage for the “Get $X off” super-early-bird banner. That is the tier that usually rewards the earliest calendar block.