Shaping the future of AI
The AI Conference was founded on a clear belief: AI is not a standalone technology—it is becoming the foundation of modern software, infrastructure, and business.
Since launching in 2023, the conference has focused relentlessly on applied AI: how AI systems are actually built, deployed, governed, and scaled in the real world.
What began as a deeply technical gathering of engineers and researchers has evolved alongside the market. As AI moved from experimentation to enterprise adoption, The AI Conference expanded to bring together builders, operators, executives, investors, and policymakers—all with a shared goal of turning AI capability into real impact.
The program is designed to reflect how AI is used in practice:
- Frontiers explores emerging research and capabilities.
- Builders focuses on implementation, infrastructure, and operations.
- Applied AI showcases production deployments and measurable outcomes.
- Strategy addresses governance, economics, and organizational change.
- Vertical tracks deliver deep, industry-specific insight across sectors like healthcare, finance, advertising, and retail.
Hands-on workshops, Hack Day, and the Startup Showdown ensure the conference is as much about execution as it is about ideas—creating a space where teams build, companies launch, and lessons are shared openly.
Shon Burton
Founder / Producer
The AI Conference
Shon Burton
Founder, The AI Conference
Shon Burton is the founder of The AI Conference. Previously Mr. Burton was the founder and CEO of HiringSolved, a leading AI-software startup in the HR Tech industry. HiringSolved was acquired in 2017. Mr. Burton is also the founder of MLconf, The Machine Learning Conference, a top ranked industry event series covering the research and implementation of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning based technologies. MLconf was acquired in 2020.
Ben Lorica
Program Chair
The AI Conference
Ben Lorica
Program Chair, The AI Conference
Ben Lorica is the Program Chair of The AI Conference. Previously Ben was the Program Chair for the Strata Data Conference, the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, and TensorFlow World. Ben is an advisor to the following startups and organizations: Databricks, Anyscale, Anodot, AimStack, BNH, Faculty, Ivy, Matroid, Meaning, Metaphor Data, Visual Layer, Graphistry, Yakit, and The Center for Data Intensive Science + Open Commons Consortium (University of Chicago). Ben is an investor in CipherMode, Faculty, Gloo, and Lamini. He was also previously an advisor to Determined AI, Lattice Data, Alluxio, Pathmind, and to DeepScale. He serves as co-chair for several leading industry conferences: the NLP Summit, the Data+AI Summit, Ray Summit, and K1st World. He is @BigData on Twitter, on Mastodon.
Sheri Graeber
VP of Operations
Sheri Graeber
VP of Operations
Sheri manages operations logistics and vendor management for The AI Conference and works closely with Sponsors and Exhibitors. Bringing over 15 years of experience in hospitality and conference management, her previous roles include Sr. Sponsorship Engagement Manager at Freeman Company, and Project Manager of Sales Operations at O’Reilly Media.
Paige Speer
Business Operations Manager
Paige Speer
Business Operations Manager, The AI Conference
Paige is the Business Operations Manager at The AI Conference. She manages speaker correspondence, coordinating timelines, and oversees event staff and volunteer management. Prior to joining The AI Conference, Paige worked at HiringSolved, a leading AI software startup in the HR Tech industry. She holds a BA in Communications from Arizona State University, where her focus was on special events programming and management.
Courtney Burton
Co-founder / Advisor
Courtney Burton
Co-founder / Advisor
Courtney Burton is the co-founder of The AI Conference and currently serves in an advisory role. Prior to The AI Conference, Ms. Burton co-founded and operated MLconf (The Machine Learning Conference), a top-ranked industry event series focused on the research and implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. MLconf was acquired in 2020.
Susan Stewart
Sponsorship Sales
Susan Stewart
Sponsorship Sales
Susan has an extensive background with conference sponsorship sales in the emerging technologies space. Susan has led sponsorship sales on many launch events including the Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 Expo and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. She was Vice President of Sales for O’Reilly’s Strata Data Conference and O’Reilly’s AI conference, which had international representation in five locations annually. Susan seeks to create sponsorships to connect technology buyers with sellers in emerging and accelerated markets.
Sandra Archuleta
Sponsorship Sales
Sandra Archuleta
Sponsorship Sales
Sandra is a business development and sales professional whose goal is to create sponsorship packages that align to her clients’ goals. Her sales background includes working for GES, an exhibition contractor and Splash Events; an exhibit design house. Sandra has generated sponsorship sales for Interop trade shows in the U.S. and Japan. For O’Reilly’s Strata Data Conference global events, her previous role as Strategic Account Manager was to develop and grow relationships with both newly funded start-ups and established technology vendors in Silicon Valley.
Karlee Vincent
Director of Events
Karlee Vincent
Director of Events
Karlee is the Director of Events at The AI Conference, bringing over a decade of experience in strategic sponsorship management, conference development, and crafting custom experiences. Throughout her career, she has contributed to major events including Autodesk University, Zoomtopia, Cisco Live, Snowflake Summit, Knowledge, Coupa Inspire, Maker Faire, Strata Data Conference, and O’Reilly’s AI Conference. Karlee is also the author of Pump or Bust, a witty and insightful guide designed to support new families returning to work after parental leave.
Her expertise has been featured in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Care.com, CNN, Ms., and SUCCESS magazine, among others. Previously, she held roles focused on sponsorship engagement at Maker Faire, Freeman Company, Sparks, and O’Reilly Media.
Dr. Danny Bickson
Advisor
CEO, Visual Layer
Dr. Danny Bickson
Advisor
CEO, Visual Layer
12 years ago, along with my collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University, I have started the GraphLab large scale open source project, which is a framework for implementing machine learning algorithms/big data analytics in parallel and distributed settings. When the project became popular, we have decided to raise money to expand the project and provide an industry grade solution. Our company Turi was acquired by Apple, who released our framework as Apple’s open source named Turi Create:
https://github.com/apple/turicreate.
I spent 5 years at Apple as a senior manager working on applied data science in multiple areas including deep learning for iPhone manufacturing cosmetic defect testing. I recently quit and looking for new ventures.
My blog: http://bickson.blogspot.com
Specialties: Large scale machine learning, big data, distributed algorithms, numerical iterative methods, convex optimization, interior point methods, message passing algorithms, large scale matrix factorization, collaborative filtering, linear system of equations, linear regression, Hadoop, Map-Reduce, Amazon EC2, cluster computing, cloud computing, signal processing, Kalman filters, Gaussian mixtures, multivariate statistics, heavy-tailed distributions, alpha-stable distributions, MCMC methods.
James Cham
Advisor
Partner, Bloomberg Beta
James Cham
Advisor
Partner, Bloomberg Beta
Sharon Zhou, PhD
Advisor
Corporate VP of AI at AMD
Sharon Zhou, PhD
Advisor
Corporate VP of AI at AMD
Dr. Sharon Zhou is the VP of AI at AMD and was the founder and CEO of Lamini, an AI startup that won last year’s VentureBeat Gen AI Startup Award.
Tal Kachman, PhD
Advisor
Professor of AI, Radboud University
Tal Kachman, PhD
Advisor
Professor of AI, Radboud University
Since 2022 Tal has been a Professor of AI in Radboud university and a visiting professor in the Yale school of management.
Professor Tal Kachman received his B.Sc (chemistry), B.Sc(physics and mathematics), M.Sc (Engineering) from the Technion I.I.T. He obtained his Ph.D in theoretical physics from the Massachusetts institute of technology and Technion I.I.T
Following his studies, he was a postdoctoral and then research staff member in IBM research NY working on Machine learning for healthcare and life science, fundamentals of deep learning and quantum machine learning.
Post IBM he co founded Rhizome Works, a deep learning startup dealing with large scale control problems and data security, later being acquired.
Following the acquisition of Rhizome Tal was a member of the machine learning research group in AQR capital management working on alpha generation portfolio optimization and trade execution.
Assaf Araki
Advisor
Investment Director, Intel Capital
Assaf Araki
Advisor
Investment Director, Intel Capital
I’m an investment manager at Intel Capital, focusing on AI and Data Analytics platforms and products. All of my professional career focused on AI and data analytics. These days AI & data analytics are under a huge disruption from algorithms and libraries to database management systems and compute engines. The unique culture of the data analytics community drives this disruption, together with the huge progress in deep learning technology. Researchers and startups are leading the data revolution at a fast pace. What is the next Spark? Caffe? What are the next-generation toolsets for a data scientist? How will machine learning change the way we build software and products?
Josh Wills
Advisor
Josh Wills
Advisor
Josh has held many software and data engineering roles at companies including Slack, Cloudera, and Google.
