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.

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.