Day ZERØ is capped at 350 participants—a curated environment where senior engineers, product leaders, founders, and executives converge before the main conference opens. While The AI Conference will host over 5,500 attendees, Day ZERØ creates an intentionally small setting optimized for deep technical learning, strategic leadership development, and meaningful collaboration. Full 3 day pass.
This is ground ZERØ for where AI ideas come to life. Running parallel to Day ZERØ workshops, Hack Day brings together builders racing against the clock to ship functioning AI applications in a single day. Day ZERØ participants move between structured learning and live collaboration—watching teams build, offering feedback, and forming the connections that turn concepts into companies. The winning Hack Day team earns the opportunity to pitch live to top venture capitalists on the Startup Showdown stage during Day 1 of the main conference, creating a direct bridge from experimentation to exposure, capital, and scale.
Day ZERØ is capped at 350 participants—a curated environment where senior engineers, product leaders, founders, and executives converge before the main conference opens. While The AI Conference will host over 5,500 attendees, Day ZERØ creates an intentionally small setting optimized for deep technical learning, strategic leadership development, and meaningful collaboration. Full 3 day pass.
Build something real.
This isn’t a hackathon — it’s Day Zero for your next company.
One focused day where a small group of serious builders and founders work with modern AI tooling, clear constraints, and real expectations to ship something that actually works. No toy projects, no weekend demos that quietly disappear — the goal is to leave with a product you can credibly show to customers and investors as the first version of a real business.
Join a focused room of brilliant minds turning ideas into products with real customer potential — the kind of people who already live at the edge of what these tools can do.
Get direct feedback as you build, test, and refine — and prepare your product to stand in front of judges, investors, and the broader AI community.
No points for clever prototypes. Teams compete on execution, product clarity, and real-world viability — could a customer actually use it, and would they pay?
The winning team takes the main stage at The AI Conference the next day to pitch a panel of top venture capitalists at the Startup Showdown — the kind of room most founders wait years to get into. You could earn your seat in twenty-four hours.
This is your shot. Don't miss it.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic predicts the first billion-dollar company with a single human employee could arrive as soon as 2026. Every one of those companies has a day one.
This is where yours could begin.
- AI WEEK EVENT -
Hack Day Support Provided By:
Technical Track
Deep-dive, hands-on sessions for engineers and builders covering model development, RAG, infra, evaluation, agents, and real-world deployment patterns.
Leadership Track
Strategy-focused sessions for founders and executives on AI roadmaps, product strategy, governance, organizational change, and safely scaling AI in production.
Conference Starts in:
The first confirmed workshops for Day ZERØ 2026. Additional workshops will be announced soon!
Building Production-Ready AI Agents on Google Cloud Run
Prototyping an AI agent is faster than ever, but transitioning that prototype into a secure, scalable, and observable production application is where the real engineering begins. In this 90-minute interactive workshop, you will move beyond “Day 1” demos to master enterprise-grade AI deployment on Google Cloud’s serverless platform.
We have prepared hands-on labs so you can experience firsthand how to build and scale applications on Cloud Run—whether it’s an intelligent AI agent or a high-performance AI inference app with serverless GPUs. You can choose a lab of your interest or do them all:
- AI Assistant Agent: Build and orchestrate intelligent workflows using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) on Cloud Run with Firestore.
- Personal Agent with Secure Sandboxes: Safely execute untrusted, agent-generated code in highly secure Cloud Run Sandboxes that start in sub-second.
- High-Performance Serverless Inference: Run low-latency open model inference using Gemma 4 on Cloud Run GPUs.
Lisa Shen
Product Manager
Google
Designing Reliable Agentic Systems that make it into Production
Most agents don’t fail in production because the model is bad. They fail because the system around the model has no guardrails, no structure, and no way to see what’s happening. In this session, we’ll make the case that reliability is an engineering problem, not a prompting one.
We’ll walk through the harness every production agent needs: control flow, a real plan-execute-observe-replan design, and observability you can act on. We’ll back it with production failures we’ve all seen and a benchmark where the same model went from 20% to 60%+ just by changing the system.
You’ll leave with a pre-deploy checklist: the blocks to include, and the ones most teams forget.
João Moura
CEO
crewAI
Lorenze Hay
Software Engineer
crewAI
Kill, Suspend, or Scale?
A Hands-On AI Governance Workshop Using the CHOIR-G Framework
The Problem:
Standard technical metrics like Accuracy and Recall do not measure real-world risk, especially in high-stakes environments. This workshop moves beyond theoretical AI ethics to provide a hard, quantitative framework for deployment decisions.
Participants will learn the CHOIR-G Framework, a risk-weighted scoring model, and apply it in real-time to a notorious healthcare case study, calculating risk to make a definitive “Kill, Suspend, or Scale” deployment decision.
As AI systems move from sandbox to production, engineering and leadership teams face a critical “AI Risk Gap.” A model may boast high internal performance metrics, but if it fails in a live, dynamic environment, who is harmed? Who owns the risk outcomes? Are core error controls in place at reporting?
This 90-minute workshop equips AI builders and strategists with the CHOIR-G Framework: a vendor-neutral, highly actionable governance methodology that bridges technical performance with social trust and enterprise accountability.
CHOIR evaluates five core dimensions:
- Context
- Human Impact
- Organizational Accountability
- Indicators
- Review & Oversight
Instead of passively listening to a lecture, attendees will be put to work.
After a brief breakdown of the CHOIR-G mathematics :
S = wC * C + wH * H + wO * O + wI * I + wR * R
where:
- S = overall composite score
- wC = weight assigned to the C dimension
- wH = weight assigned to the H dimension
- wO = weight assigned to the O dimension
- wI = weight assigned to the I dimension
- wR = weight assigned to the R dimension
- C = score for the C dimension
- H = score for the H dimension
- O = score for the O dimension
- I = score for the I dimension
- R = score for the R dimension
The room will break into groups to act as a board for governing enterprise AI.
The Hands-On Case Study:
Groups will be tasked with conducting a governance review of the Epic Systems Sepsis Early Warning System.
In internal testing, the model boasted a high AUC-ROC, but in production, University of Michigan researchers (published in JAMA Internal Medicine) found it missed 67% of actual sepsis cases because the model “cheated” by picking up on when doctors were already ordering antibiotics.
Given the life-or-death stakes, teams must debate the weights of each CHOIR dimension for this specific deployment, score the system’s failure, and determine the necessary governance outcome, ultimately working through the process to establish the strict “Human-in-the-Loop” protocols required to secure such a system.
What Attendees Will Walk Away Knowing:
- The CHOIR-G Scoring Mechanics: How to implement a 1–15 risk-weighted scoring system for any AI model.
- The “Critical 1” Automatic Intervention: How to establish non-negotiable guardrails in their deployment pipelines to prevent catastrophic edge-case failures.
- Cross-Functional Translation: How to translate abstract ethical and risk concerns into concrete, quantifiable metrics that engineering, legal, and executive teams can agree on.
Dr. Stella Umunna
Adjunct Professor
George Washington University
George Rivera
Doctoral Student
Organizational Change & Leadership
Baylor University
How AI-Powered Leaders Make Better Strategic Decisions
Leaders today face more data, more possibilities, and more uncertainty than ever.
Yet making better strategic decisions is not simply a matter of moving faster or asking AI for an answer. It requires knowing when to slow down, challenge your assumptions, and widen the lens.
In this interactive workshop, founders and executives will use practical tools from decision science, critical thinking, and leadership to work through a real strategic decision with or without AI as a thought partner.
Bring a decision you are currently facing and leave with new perspectives, greater clarity, and a more thoughtful path forward.
Mo Fong
Executive Coach
Adjunct Lecturer
Mo Lei Fong has spent her career at the intersection of technology, education, entrepreneurship, and human potential. She was at Google for over 15 years in senior leadership roles spanning technology, operations, and people including Chief Compliance Officer for Google Payments and leading Search Technical Solutions across 20+ verticals serving billions of users with work that laid early foundations for what we now experience as AI-powered assistants.
Today, Mo is an Adjunct Lecturer in Management Science & Engineering and directs the Accel Leadership Program for entrepreneurs. She also teaches AI-Powered Leadership with Stanford Continuing Studies. Mo a startup advisor and investor, AI Leadership Advisor for Corporate Edge, and founder of LeiFongCoaching. She holds degrees from Stanford in chemical engineering and education, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
From AI Experiments to Enterprise Strategy:
Build Your AI Investment Portfolio
Move beyond AI experimentation and make smarter decisions about where to invest.
In this hands-on workshop, leaders will:
Evaluate and prioritize AI opportunities within their own organizations
Explore build vs. buy vs. partner decisions
Identify where to invest, where to wait, and what to stop
Through practical exercises and discussion, attendees will leave with a framework for building a focused AI investment strategy and a clear path toward action.
Evangelos Simoudis
Co-founder and Managing Director
Synapse Partners
Evangelos Simoudis is co-founder and managing partner of Synapse Partners, where he invests in enterprise AI startups and advises global corporations and governments on AI, mobility, and innovation. With 35+ years in Silicon Valley, he has been a venture investor, entrepreneur, corporate executive, and technologist, including leadership roles at Apax Partners, Trident Capital, IBM, and two AI startups.
He is the author of The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future, Transportation Transformation, and The Flagship Experience, exploring how AI and software-defined vehicles are reshaping mobility. A Caltech and Brandeis advisory board member, he holds a Ph.D. in computer science focused on machine learning and large databases from Brandeis, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Caltech.
Learnings Put into Practice:
A real-world, scenario-based discussion for startups using AI models to provide & develop their products/services
This final session of the Leadership Track will bring together the day’s learnings and challenge you to apply them to a real-world scenario.
You and your fellow session mates will need to find solutions for a startup facing an operational and leadership dilemma, giving you the opportunity to test-run your ideas in a safe environment.
You will present your ideas and vigorously defend your positions, incorporating the new insights you acquired during Day Zerø as well as incorporating new concepts brought up that may have been unforeseen.
You will need to react to actual situations facing startup leaders when incorporating AI use into their business models.
You’ll hear different perspectives from the diverse audience and reinforce or reevaluate your thoughts as you might in a discussion with senior industry advisors.
We will set the stage for the workshop with initial coverage of:
AI model cost considerations
AI model evaluation and selection
AI development and process transparency considerations
Legal considerations (model use liability as well as client-produced generative solution liability)
Client and internal company data stewardship
Team acceptance and management during AI use for the products/services
This facilitator-led case discussion will require you to think on your feet, reacting in real-time to market impediments and business obstacles.
You should be prepared for cold calls and bring your specific industry knowledge into the discussion, utilizing fact-based points to present your argument or perspective.
You’ll leave this session armed with new ideas and well-discussed points you can apply immediately to your firm’s AI approach.
The learnings from this workshop will be memorable from the engaged discussions, impactful from the robust debates, and actionable from the vetted deliberations.
John Blevins
Professor
Cornell Tech
UC Berkeley School of Information
UCLA Anderson
Go from idea to working product
Without needing a full technical team
Marily Nika walks you through a modern AI-powered product development process: validating demand, defining what to build, pressure-testing decisions with AI agents, creating prototypes, and evaluating whether the product actually works.
You’ll see where AI can replace work that once required additional research, design, engineering, and analysis support—and leave with a practical path from idea to working prototype and real user feedback.
What You’ll Learn
1. Validate Real Demand
Use AI-assisted research alongside real user conversations to uncover meaningful pain points, willingness to pay, and strong product signals before you build.
2. Turn Insights Into Focused Requirements
Translate what you learn into a prioritized PRD that defines the user, core use cases, success metrics, and smallest valuable feature set.
3. Pressure-Test Your Product With AI Agents
Create product, customer, engineering, and risk reviewers that challenge your assumptions around scope, feasibility, privacy, customer value, and overpromising.
4. Prototype From Evidence
Turn validated requirements into UI concepts, iterate quickly, and move the strongest ideas into the right no-code or AI-powered builder.
5. Know the Difference Between a Prototype and an MVP
Use prototypes to gather evidence before investing further, then define MVP tests around desirability, feasibility, business viability, and your riskiest assumptions.
6. Measure Product Quality
Build rubrics and evaluation loops to assess AI outputs for relevance, groundedness, completeness, safety, and hallucination risk.
Scan to Join
Marily Nika
Founder and CEO
AI Product Academy
How to Build a Multimodal AI System That Runs Entirely on Your Own Hardware
Kavya Sri Chennoju
Staff AI Engineer
Arm
Day ZERØ
Sept 29
limited ticket release active
Day ZERØ is a high-signal, small-room kickoff where senior builders and leaders spend a full day moving between 8 focused workshops and a live AI Hack Day before the main conference begins. The AI Conference full experience starts here.
Full 3 day pass
Capped at 350 people, this where AI ideas go from concept to usable tech in real-time. It includes technical or leadership tracks (8 sessions, 90 min each), deeper discussions, and direct access to speakers and peers.
Technical Track
Deep-dive, hands-on sessions for engineers and builders covering model development, RAG, infra, evaluation, agents, and real-world deployment patterns.
- Google Cloud Run for Agentic Apps – Hands-on labs using Cloud Run to design, deploy, and scale agentic AI services with Google’s latest tooling.
Additional workshops announced soon
Leadership Track
Strategy-focused sessions for founders and executives on AI roadmaps, product strategy, governance, organizational change, and safely scaling AI in production.
Observe or participate in a live AI build environment. See frontier ideas move from concept to working systems in real time.
An intimate gathering with fellow operators and speakers designed for meaningful conversations before the larger conference begins.
Start early, avoid lines, and move seamlessly into the two-day conference with complete access to all programming.
Access to all AI WEEK events, including Party in the Park, Ignite Talks, and exclusive attendee networking events.
Day ZERØ is sold out!
If new inventory becomes available we will notify current two day conference pass holders of a path to upgrade. Use the link to secure passes to the full two day conference before they sell out.
Limited Ticket Release Active
Networking Event
All registered attendees get an invite to the AI industry’s most anticipated private after-hours event.
Party in the Park is an open-air celebration where ideas meet vibes and the AI community comes to life under the stars.
This AI WEEK event will feature:
- Live music that keeps the energy high
- Ice-cold drinks and good food
- Big giveaways
- A surprise announcement you’ll want to be there for
Sponsored by:
San Francisco
The AI Conference 2026 is hosted at Pier 48, a waterfront venue in San Francisco’s Mission Rock neighborhood. The space sits steps from Oracle Park and the emerging Mission Rock district, with easy access from downtown, Caltrain, and major freeways.
The AI Conference 2026
Pier 48 · Shed A and B
48 Pier 48, San Francisco, CA 94158
Mission Rock waterfront district
Get early access to speaker announcements, private invites, and AI Week information.