TEDAI 2026

TEDAI 2026 is the official TED conference on artificial intelligence, running 28-30 October 2026 at the Hofburg imperial palace in Vienna, Austria. It is TED's only AI-dedicated conference and the third Vienna edition, curated by co-founder and director Alina Nikolaou with the TED organisation. The three days are deliberately different from one another: a black-tie opening gala on Wednesday evening, a Thursday "Discovery Day" of workshops, panel stages and off-site "Ideas Adventures" hosted in Viennese museums, concert halls and TU Wien's robotics hall, and a Friday devoted to more than twenty main-stage TED Talks. Organisers publish 60+ speakers across 48 sessions and expect roughly 1,100 to 1,200 guests drawn from 65+ countries and 820+ organisations, with about one attendee in three an executive. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2018 Turing Award winner and 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, both joins a safety panel with Jurgen Schmidhuber and delivers the closing talk.

Date

October 28–30, 2026

Location

Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria

Format

In-Person

Event Type

Conference

Status

Upcoming

Expected Attendance

1,100+

Pricing

Paid

Organizer

TED

Added

Jun 24, 2026

Updated

Aug 10, 2026

• ✓CTO
• ✓CIO
• ✓Chief AI Officer
• ✓VP of Engineering
• ✓Head of AI Strategy
• ✓Policy and regulatory affairs lead
• ✓Founder
• ✓AI researcher

This is the rare AI conference where the agenda is set by editorial curation rather than sponsorship, so a CTO or Chief AI Officer gets three days of argument they cannot buy elsewhere: Hinton on what actually worries him, a working researcher panel on whether scaling has plateaued, and a regulation panel spanning EU policy, clinical practice and African deployment. With roughly 1,100 guests from 820+ organisations and a third of them executives, the peer density is high and the vendor density is low. Leaders come away with a defensible three-year read on agents, safety and AI labour substitution - the framing questions that sit above any individual procurement decision - plus an Executive Track option for closed-door discussion with 30+ team leaders facing the same choices.

• ✓Three named panel stages: The Boardroom (real-world AI transformation), The Salon (societal impact) and The Playground (participatory experimentation)
• ✓Workshops including 'Everything you need to know about AI lie detection', 'This is your AI. This is your AI on drugs' and 'The AI and Immortality Roleplay'
• ✓Ideas Adventures: sound walks with ML along the Prater and Danube Canal, rewriting museum labels with a language model at the Belvedere, robotics at TU Wien, an AI perfumery workshop at the Naturhistorisches Museum
• ✓Main-stage panel 'After the plateau, an update' with Oriol Vinyals, Lukasz Kaiser and Swami Sivasubramanian
• ✓A regulation panel chaired across policy, medicine and mental-health practitioners, plus talks on red-teaming in public and open models
• ✓Themed AI dinners on the evening of 29 October and a black-tie opening gala at the Hofburg on 28 October
• ✓Executive Track (application required) with four closed-door discovery sessions for senior leaders
• ✓Attendee app launching 14 October for session sign-ups and personal agendas; all meals and beverages included in every pass

• ★The only TED-branded conference dedicated to artificial intelligence, and the only one staged in Europe - the format, curation and speaker preparation are TED's, not a vendor's
• ★Geoffrey Hinton appears twice on the published programme: a moderated long-view safety panel with Jurgen Schmidhuber, and the closing talk 'What I worry about at night'
• ★A single-track main stage on day three rather than parallel breakouts, so every attendee leaves having seen the same 20+ talks - unusually good for follow-up conversations
• ★Day two runs almost entirely off-site as 'Ideas Adventures' in Viennese cultural institutions (Belvedere, Naturhistorisches Museum, MuseumsQuartier, Gartenbaukino, TU Wien), which is a genuinely different format from a hotel-ballroom AI summit
• ★An application-gated Executive Track adds four closed-door discovery sessions for leaders running teams of 30 or more

All prices exclude VAT. Standard Pass EUR 1,500 (list EUR 1,700), available until 15 September 2026 or sold out; Late Pass EUR 1,700; Group Pass EUR 1,200 per seat for three or more, including a three-week pre-event prep framework and a post-conference reporting guide; Executive Track EUR 2,500, application required, for leaders managing 30+ people, adding four closed-door discovery sessions; Donor Pass EUR 4,000 with speaker dinners, backstage tours and speaker-lounge access. The Early Supporter tier at EUR 1,000 is sold out. Every pass includes the opening gala, both programme days, 20+ TED Talks, all workshops and panels, all meals and beverages, parties and dinners, and the attendee app.

When is TEDAI 2026?

TEDAI 2026 takes place October 28–30, 2026 in Vienna, Austria.

Where is TEDAI 2026 held?

TEDAI 2026 is held in Vienna, Austria. The event format is in-person.

How much does TEDAI 2026 cost?

TEDAI 2026 is paid. All prices exclude VAT. Standard Pass EUR 1,500 (list EUR 1,700), available until 15 September 2026 or sold out; Late Pass EUR 1,700; Group Pass EUR 1,200 per seat for three or more, including a three-week pre-event prep framework and a post-conference reporting guide; Executive Track EUR 2,500, application required, for leaders managing 30+ people, adding four closed-door discovery sessions; Donor Pass EUR 4,000 with speaker dinners, backstage tours and speaker-lounge access. The Early Supporter tier at EUR 1,000 is sold out. Every pass includes the opening gala, both programme days, 20+ TED Talks, all workshops and panels, all meals and beverages, parties and dinners, and the attendee app.

Who should attend TEDAI 2026?

TEDAI 2026 is aimed at CTO, CIO, Chief AI Officer, VP of Engineering, Head of AI Strategy, Policy and regulatory affairs lead, Founder, AI researcher.

What topics does TEDAI 2026 cover?

TEDAI 2026 covers AI agents, AI safety, AI policy and regulation, Digital labor and knowledge work, AI in medicine and drug discovery, Open models and open science, AI and culture, Brain-computer decoding.

This page was written from 3 sources, 1 on domains other than tedai-vienna.ted.com.

1. 1.tedai-vienna.ted.com — tedai-vienna.ted.comvendor
2. 2.tedai-vienna.ted.com — programvendor
3. 3.trendingtopics.eu — openclaw creator peter steinberger to speak at tedai 2026 in