AI Council, the AI conference designed for humans who ship, today announced the full program for its 2026 meeting, taking place May 12–14 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. More than 1,500 engineers, founders and technical leaders will attend across 10 programming tracks featuring 100+ speakers building AI systems at scale.
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Pete Soderling, Founder of AI Council (formerly Data Council) and General Partner at Zero Prime Ventures, addresses the AI Council community.
Previously known as Data Council, AI Council 2026 is a unique, vendor-neutral event that brings together the people building the systems and tools that move industries. Now in its eleventh year, this is where the most influential minds—current and future—architect the industry’s next chapter. Practitioners get real about what’s happening behind the scenes of AI, whether it’s production failures, the creation of hidden middleware tooling or complicated engineering tradeoffs and their impacts. Participants are unafraid to get into the weeds to chart the course for the next 2+ years of AI builds.
Trends to Watch
AI Council Founder and Zero Prime Ventures General Partner Pete Soderling and his team have surfaced several under-the-radar shifts already reshaping the AI landscape. These include:
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European Founders Are Burning the Boats: A quiet migration is not just taking place but rapidly accelerating. Young, elite technical founders from Germany, Switzerland, France, the UK and elsewhere are bypassing London and Berlin entirely and relocating to San Francisco to build AI infrastructure companies.
“If you want to build at the tooling layer—closer to the chips, deeper in the stack—the Bay Area is the only place to do it,” said Soderling. “These European founders know that. They’ve burned the boats. They gave up everything to be here, which means they have nothing to lose and everything to prove. American founders who are coasting on a Stanford pedigree should be watching their backs.”
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The “Death of the Engineer” Isn’t Happening: The prevailing narrative says vibe coding and AI agents will hollow out software engineering. The practitioners building those agents disagree.
“Vibe coding is going to democratize engineering superpowers in ways that make STEM bootcamps and offshoring look quaint,” Soderling noted. “But you still can’t automate taste. The engineers who know how systems truly work, who can catch a model making a mistake, who can decompose a problem before handing it to the model, those people are more valuable than ever. The floor for engineering is getting lower, but the ceiling is going up.”
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Video AI Will Force a Full-Stack Rebuild: LLMs reshaped how the world works with text. Video is about to undergo a similar transformation, and the entire data stack must be rebuilt to support it.
“Engineers in our community know that we’re about to see video data being 90% of all new data generated. Video LLMs are going to do to the data stack what text LLMs did three years ago—blow the whole thing up,” added Soderling. “We’re investing in the tooling and infra rebuild before most people have even asked the question.”
Defining the Future
AI Council is known for giving space to great engineering talent to speak freely about the challenges and opportunities they face. This includes everyone from established leaders to relative unknowns seeking to make their mark. For example, Greg Brockman spoke at a conference organized by Soderling before co-founding OpenAI. Edo Liberty, former Director of Research at Amazon AI Labs, presented his research before founding Pinecone. The team that built Iceberg at Netflix took the stage before selling Tabular to Databricks for a reported $2 billion. This track record underscores that AI Council has become a leading indicator for where the industry is moving.
Headlining this year’s conference is Diogo Almeida, co-inventor of ChatGPT, InstructGPT, RLHF, and GPT-4, and co-founder of TypeSafe AI, a company rethinking foundational LLM architecture for no-human-in-the-loop automation. Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB—one of the most widely used data tools in the world—will take the stage to preview what he’s calling a “super-secret next big thing” for DuckDB.
Additional keynotes and sessions include: Eno Reyes, CTO of Factory (Sequoia-backed); Nikhil Benesch, CTO of turbopuffer (used in production by Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion); Nikita Shamgunov, VP at Databricks and founder of Neon (acquired by Databricks); Dwarak Rajagopal, VP of AI Engineering and Research at Snowflake; Yury Izrailevsky, co-founder and President of ClickHouse; and Heather Ceylan, CISO of Box.
Many speakers will debut new research, tools and production benchmarks, making AI Council a consistent source of industry-defining announcements. It is also a venue for identifying the hottest, undiscovered startups–the ones that will be next year’s breakout successes.
AI Council is home to an AI Launchpad event in which six startups are selected to demo their technology for Soderling’s Zero Prime Ventures, other investors and technical founders. Last year’s participants included Mooncake Labs (acquired by Databricks five months later), TopK (raised a $5.5M seed from Earlybird within weeks of presenting), and Tower.dev (raised $6.4M seed from Speedinvest after AI Council’s AI Launchpad).
Community Driven
AI Council is independently run and vendor neutral. Talks and presentations are selected by a panel of technical experts and founders in the community, resulting in deeply technical, peer-reviewed sessions.
To view the complete conference agenda and register for AI Council 2026, please go to https://aicouncil.com. For press credentials and briefing requests, contact press@aicouncil.com.
About AI Council
AI Council is the independent, community-led technical conference for engineers, researchers, founders, and builders who are shaping AI and data infrastructure. Running since 2015, the conference has featured the early work of engineers who went on to build ChatGPT, Pinecone, DuckDB, Apache Iceberg, and other foundational technologies. Learn more at aicouncil.com.
About Zero Prime Ventures
Zero Prime Ventures writes the first checks for deeply technical, engineer-founded companies at the moment of company inception. The firm focuses on data infrastructure, AI/ML tooling, and developer tools, and is the venture arm of the AI Council community. Learn more at zeroprime.vc.
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