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.
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 Agentic Systems
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
Build a Reproducible Evaluation Environment for AI Web Research Agents
Every team building AI agents that search the web faces the same evaluation problem: the internet changes constantly, making benchmarks unreliable and results impossible to reproduce.
In this workshop, attendees will learn how to build offline evaluation environments that make agent testing fast, stable, and repeatable.
We’ll use Deep Research Bench (DRB) as our working example. DRB is a benchmark of 89 multi-step web research tasks across 8 categories, each with human-verified answers and a frozen archive of scraped web pages. For high-complexity tasks, agents can access over 189,000 archived pages, all frozen in time.
We validated that agents evaluated against this offline “RetroSearch” environment perform comparably to agents using the live web, meaning you get reproducible results without sacrificing realism.
Attendees will work through the key design decisions behind building these environments:
How to scope and freeze a web corpus using tools like Serper, Playwright, and ScraperAPI
How to structure tasks of varying difficulty with reliable scoring (precision, recall, F1, binary)
How to validate that offline results generalize to live performance
We’ll also share what we learned from benchmarking frontier models including o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro (live results at evals.futuresearch.ai), including common failure patterns around hallucination, tool use, and forgetting.
Attendees will leave with a reusable methodology for building frozen-web evaluation environments for any agent that relies on web research.
Dan Schwarz
CEO, Co-founder
FutureSearch
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.
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.
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.