AI meet-ups and events

These events offer great opportunities for networking, learning, and exploring the latest breakthroughs and trends in the field. We will continue to add events to this list as they are confirmed.

If you have an event or conference that you think we should feature, please get in touch with the team.

ICML 2026: International Conference on Machine Learning – Seoul, South Korea (6–11 July 2026)

ICML is one of the world’s leading machine learning conferences and remains a core signal event for anyone tracking where AI research is heading before it becomes product, platform, or investment thesis. The 2026 edition in Seoul will bring together work across machine learning theory, optimisation, generative models, reinforcement learning, AI for science, foundation models, and the computational methods driving modern AI. This is still an academic conference, but it is not detached from the market. It is where many of the ideas that later shape applied AI systems first become visible.

KDD 2026: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining – Jeju, South Korea (9–13 August 2026)

KDD is a strong fit for technologists who care about AI beyond the model layer. The conference sits at the intersection of machine learning, data science, knowledge discovery, applied data systems and evaluation, making it especially relevant for those working on AI in real-world environments where data quality, benchmarks, pipelines, and deployment constraints matter. For innovators and investors trying to understand the infrastructure beneath AI adoption, KDD offers a useful bridge between research depth and applied technical relevance.

IJCAI-ECAI 2026: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and European Conference on Artificial Intelligence – Bremen, Germany (15–21 August 2026)

IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is one of the strongest European AI anchors of the year. It brings together the international and European AI research communities across learning, reasoning, planning, agents, robotics, knowledge representation, human-centred AI, and applied systems. For a senior technologist or innovation lead, the value is breadth: this is a place to see how AI is developing beyond the current foundation model cycle, and how older AI disciplines are being pulled back into relevance by agents, autonomy and more complex decision-making systems.

Ray Summit 2026 – San Francisco, California, USA (24–26 August 2026)

Ray Summit is focused on production AI systems, with technical talks covering foundation model training, multimodal AI, reinforcement learning, and the infrastructure required to run AI workloads at scale. For technologists working with distributed systems, model serving, AI pipelines or production deployment, this is closer to the build room than the boardroom. It is a good fit for readers interested in how advanced AI moves from research environment to operational system.

ECCV 2026: European Conference on Computer Vision – Malmö, Sweden (8–12 September 2026)

ECCV is one of the leading global conferences for computer vision and visual AI. It is highly relevant for readers tracking AI in robotics, autonomous systems, medical imaging, manufacturing, security, simulation, creative tools, and multimodal models. As the next phase of AI becomes more visual, spatial and embodied, computer vision is no longer a niche technical area. ECCV gives a serious view of where machine perception is moving and what that means for applied intelligent systems.

AI Infra Summit 2026 – Santa Clara, California, USA (15–17 September 2026)

The AI race is increasingly an infrastructure race. This event focuses on compute, AI data centres, data movement, networking, storage, systems architecture, and the physical and digital foundations needed to train and run advanced AI. For CTOs, investors, infrastructure strategists and applied AI teams, this is one of the more useful applied events. It is not about whether AI matters. It is about what has to be built for AI to work at scale.

dotAI 2026 – Paris, France (17 September 2026)

dotAI is a one-day Paris conference aimed at AI builders and developers that speaks more directly to the applied technical community than many broader AI summits. The event is positioned for people building with AI rather than simply talking about transformation, making it a good fit for software engineers, ML engineers, technical founders, CTOs, and product-minded technologists looking for practical insight into current AI tools, systems and methods.

Big Data LDN 2026 – London, UK (23–24 September 2026)

Focuses on data, analytics and AI, with practical sessions for the data community and a strong UK audience. For BI Foresight readers, the relevance is not generic AI enthusiasm, but the operational layer: data platforms, governance, analytics infrastructure and the enterprise conditions needed for AI to move from pilot to useful system.

The AI Conference 2026 – San Francisco, California, USA (29 September–1 October 2026)

The AI Conference is a useful applied AI event for builders, researchers, and technical leaders working close to the frontier of deployed systems. The San Francisco setting gives it proximity to the companies, labs and start-ups shaping the current AI stack, while the positioning is more practical than academic. For readers interested in what serious AI builders are experimenting with now, from agents and evaluation to infrastructure and applied foundation models, this is a strong transatlantic watch point.

COLM 2026: Conference on Language Modeling – San Francisco, California, USA (6–9 October 2026)

COLM is a specialist conference focused on language modelling, making it a sharp fit for those tracking the technical development of foundation models and large language models. It covers the model layer in depth: training, evaluation, alignment, efficiency, reasoning, applications, and the research questions created by general-purpose language systems. For technologists working around LLMs, agents, retrieval, model behaviour or AI product architecture, COLM is a more precise signal than most generic AI events.

AI Engineer 2026 – New York City, USA (12–14 October 2026)

AI Engineer is aimed at AI engineers, founders, and technical leaders building production systems, with tracks across agents, infrastructure, tools, model deployment, and the practical engineering patterns emerging around generative AI. It is not an academic conference, but it is technical..

PyTorch Conference North America 2026 – San Jose, California, USA (20–21 October 2026)

PyTorch Conference is a strong open-source AI infrastructure event. Hosted by the PyTorch Foundation, the 2026 edition brings together researchers, developers, and AI practitioners working across PyTorch and related projects including vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors. This is a particularly good fit for readers interested in the tools and frameworks that shape how models are trained, optimised, served, and integrated. It is technical, practical and close to the developer ecosystem that underpins modern AI.

EMNLP 2026: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing – Budapest, Hungary (24–29 October 2026)

EMNLP remains one of the most important global conferences for natural language processing and empirical AI research. It is especially relevant for those tracking language models, evaluation, retrieval, multilingual systems, reasoning, dialogue, generation, and applied NLP. For a technologist or investor, EMNLP is valuable because it shows where language AI is becoming more rigorous: how systems are tested, improved, benchmarked, and adapted across use cases and languages.

CoRL 2026: Conference on Robot Learning – Austin, Texas, USA (9–12 November 2026)

CoRL sits at the intersection of robotics and machine learning, making it a strong signal event for embodied AI. As attention begins to move from chat interfaces to systems that sense, move, and act in the physical world, robot learning becomes increasingly relevant to manufacturing, mobility, logistics, defence, healthcare, and industrial automation. CoRL is a specialist event, but for those tracking the next wave of AI beyond text and code, it is one to watch.

NeurIPS 2026: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems – Sidney, Australia (6–12 December 2026)

NeurIPS remains one of the defining global events for AI and machine learning. It brings together the research community working across neural networks, generative models, optimisation, reinforcement learning, AI safety, scientific machine learning, systems, evaluation, and the foundations of modern AI. For technologists, innovation leaders, and investors, NeurIPS is less a single conference to “attend” and more a yearly map of where the field’s centre of gravity is moving.

AAAI 2027: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence – Montréal, Canada (16–23 February 2027)

AAAI 2027 is one of the major international AI research conferences and covers the breadth of the field, including machine learning, reasoning, planning, agents, robotics, knowledge representation, human-centred AI, and applied systems. For readers looking beyond the current generative AI cycle, AAAI is useful because it keeps the wider discipline of artificial intelligence in view.