AI Conference for Humans Who Ship

Meet the top AI infrastructure minds where architects of AI share what actually works. Announcing 2027 dates soon!

WATCH 2026
2026 Sponsors

Supported by leaders in AI infrastructure

Snowflake
TextQL
HEX
Databricks
Braintrust
ClickHouse
Snorkel
Datalinks
Airbyte
Render
Turbopuffer
DigitalOcean
CockroachDB
bem
Preset
LanceDB
Chalk
Unstructured
MotherDuck
Crux
TOPK
[2015 - 2026]

A decade of infrastructure expertise.

We've been the home for high-scale builders since 2015. Originally founded as Data Council, we've spent over ten years bringing together the engineers who design the systems the world relies on. Today, we're applying that same rigorous, builder-first mindset to the AI stack.
2026 talks

High-impact sessions

from the floor

Look back at insights from this year's talks. Deep dives into the architectures and tools that defined the year.

Born Different: How AI Natives Build Startups

Born Different: How AI Natives Build Startups

The playbook for building a startup hasn't changed much in 20 years - until now. Fewer people, different skills, and a completely different sense of what's possible. A new generation of founders is shipping products with smaller teams, moving faster, and using AI across every function. Join a group of AI-native founders for a candid look at how they're actually using AI inside their own companies - in their workflows, their code, their ops - and what the shape of their teams looks like as a result.

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The World Is Not Enough: RL’s Environment Problem

The World Is Not Enough: RL’s Environment Problem

While researchers may still opine about access to compute, most are hitting a new bottleneck: access to high-quality environments in which to post-train agents. Expanding agent capabilities will depend on how we curate and utilize data, much of which exists only in the minds of human experts today. This panel will explore the challenge of building environments, including the need to improve infrastructure reliability, the obstacles posed by subjective domains, and the challenge of achieving high variety. We’ll also discuss future opportunities, such as environments for long-horizon reasoning and continual learning, and what it will take to evolve environment design from a bespoke craft into a more automated, scalable discipline that consistently drives generalization.

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AI: too good to be true, too bad to be useful

AI: too good to be true, too bad to be useful

Why are some AI applications too good to be true and others total bunk? What is the reason behind the massive gap between over-promise and under-deliver? Let's talk about LLM history, mystery, and optimization to figure out where the f**k is all the automation.

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After the Lakehouse: Building Data Infra for the AI Era

After the Lakehouse: Building Data Infra for the AI Era

The lakehouse architecture solved a real problem — but AI has rewritten the requirements. Latency, compute separation, vector workloads, real-time inference pipelines: the demands look nothing like they did five years ago. Three engineers who helped build the modern data stack join us to debate what's actually changing under the hood, what's being thrown out, and what the next five years look like for the teams who have to ship on top of it.

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2026 speakers

The minds behind. the breakthroughs

Learn from the engineers at OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Anthropic who are moving the industry forward.

Hannes Mühleisen

Hannes Mühleisen

Co-Founder & CEO, DuckDB Labs

Linus Lee

Linus Lee

Head of AI, Thrive Capital

Nikhil Benesch

Nikhil Benesch

CTO, turbopuffer

Heather Ceylan

Heather Ceylan

CISO, Box

APPLY TO SPEAKSEE ALL TALKS
2026 testimonials

Feedback from the community

AIC provides an intimate setting for interacting with other folks in the industry, whereas other conferences you may not know anyone you meet in the hallways.
Ryan Boyd, Co-Founder, MotherDuck
Priya Nair at the panel discussion
Metrics

Our 2026 impact

0

years of engineering history

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expert-led sessions

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technical attendees

Frequently asked questions

Can't find your answer here?

Our next AI Council will be in San Francisco May or April 2027.

AI Council draws 1,200+ engineers, technical founders, and researchers — the people actually building and shipping AI systems. Attendees come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Google, Meta, Snowflake, Vercel, Hugging Face, and hundreds of AI-native startups.

Highly technical content chosen by our community track hosts. No vendor pitches dressed up as talks. AI Council is practitioner-first — every talk is selected for technical depth. Speakers are engineers and researchers presenting real architectures, real tradeoffs, and real production failures.

Yes! We <3 teams at AI Council and offer streamlined packages for groups of 5 or 10 with significant savings of up to 50% off regular ticket prices. Best of all, you can purchase them directly with no invoicing or back-and-forth needed with a sales rep. Use our ticketing page to easily checkout.

Yes, we offer discounts for startups (must have raised <$10M), non-profits, government agencies and academic students & faculty. For startups, please see our ticketing site and for non-profit & academic, please contact community@aicouncil.com for more information.

Once you purchase your ticket, all talks, workshops and networking opportunities are available to you as part of the AI Council experience. However, external costs such as travel, lodgings and commuting are your responsibility.