ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems – ACM CAIS 2026

Registration for the ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems (ACM CAIS 2026) has reached capacity, with a waitlist now open. The four-day event, running from May 26–29 in San Jose, California, will feature 63 peer-reviewed research papers, 46 system demonstrations, and keynote addresses from leaders including Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski and Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar. The conference, which has partnered with the AI Engineer World's Fair, brings together over 115 academic and industry institutions focused on compound AI architectures and agentic systems.

Registration has reached capacity. Join the waitlist /pages/registration/ Building the Future of Agentic & AI Systems ACM CAIS 2026 — The premier venue for rigorous, reproducible research on compound AI architectures, optimization, and deployment. Workshops & Tutorials — Tue, May 26 Main Conference — Wed–Fri, May 27–29 Join Waitlist /pages/registration/ CAIS hotel room block & rates available until April 26 May 15 DoubleTree by Hilton San Jose 2050 Gateway Place, San Jose, CA 95110 Complimentary shuttle to/from San Jose International Airport SJC • Discounted parking $10/day Group Rate: $159/night + tax Book Hotel https://book.passkey.com/go/ACMConferenceonAiAgentic Keynote Speakers Hear from leaders shaping the future of AI and agentic systems. Andy Konwinski Co-founder of Databricks https://www.databricks.com and Perplexity AI https://www.perplexity.ai · Founder of Laude Institute https://laude.institute Laude's "Ship Your Research" mission funds open-source AI research through its Moonshots, Slingshots, and Open Frontier programs. Terminal-Bench, a Laude-backed agent benchmark, has become an industry-wide standard for measuring command line performance. Thariq Shihipar Member of Technical Staff, Claude Code · Anthropic https://anthropic.com Thariq is a core builder of Claude Code, the agentic coding tool that has become one of the most widely adopted developer interfaces for working with LLMs. His technical writing on prompt caching, tool design, and "unhobbling" has shaped how practitioners think about building reliable agentic systems. Percy Liang Professor at Stanford https://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/ · Co-founder of Together AI https://www.together.ai/ and Simile AI https://www.simile.ai/ · Creator of Marin https://marin.community/ Percy Liang is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, co-founder of Together AI and Simile AI, and the creator of Marin, which aims to build frontier models fully in the open. He has made a number of contributions in AI, including the SQuAD question answering dataset, the HELM benchmarking framework, generative agents, prefix tuning, and coining the term "foundation models". The 2026 Program Four days in San Jose, May 26–29. One day of workshops and tutorials, followed by three days of peer-reviewed research papers, system demonstrations, and keynotes. Tue, May 26 5 Workshops & Tutorials Day-long programs on agent skills, agentic software engineering, RL environments, discovery agents, and more. Browse Workshops /pages/workshops/ Wed–Fri, May 27–29 63 Research Papers Peer-reviewed contributions on architecture, optimization, evaluation, security, and engineering of AI and agentic systems. Browse Papers /program/2026/papers/ Wed–Fri, May 27–29 46 System Demos Working implementations of AI systems and agent systems, presented live by their authors. Browse Demos /program/2026/demos/ Participating Institutions CAIS 2026 papers and demos come from 115+ institutions across academia and industry, including: At a Glance Tue, May 26 | | Wed, May 27 Main Conference — Day 1 papers, demos, keynote /schedule/2026/wednesday/ Thu, May 28 Main Conference — Day 2 papers, demos, keynote /schedule/2026/thursday/ Fri, May 29 Main Conference — Day 3 papers, demos, keynote /schedule/2026/friday/ CAIS × AI Engineer World's Fair ACM CAIS 2026 has partnered with the AI Engineer World's Fair June 29–July 2, Moscone West, San Francisco . Accepted CAIS papers that earn an Industry Spotlight or Operational Experience designation will be invited to present at both venues — giving authors peer review through ACM plus a stage in front of 6,000+ practicing engineers. Learn more Become a sponsor Our Sponsors Are Hiring CAIS sponsors are looking for researchers and engineers to build the next generation of AI and agentic systems. Explore open roles from companies shaping this space. View Open Positions /pages/jobs/ What is ACM CAIS? A high-signal forum for rigorous, reproducible research on agentic and AI systems—architectures that shift the Pareto frontier through principled composition of multiple system components, smart inference-time scaling strategies, and systematic verification methods for reliable deployment. Architectural Patterns & Composition Networks of Networks and inference-time scaling architectures. Verifier-based systems leveraging generation/verification asymmetry. RAG, multi-agent, and tool-augmented designs. System Optimization & Efficiency End-to-end optimization of non-differentiable pipelines. Cost-performance trade-offs, resource allocation across components, and automated architecture search for compound systems at scale. Engineering & Operations MLOps for compound AI. Monitoring, debugging, observability, and specifications. Security and safety in multi-component systems. Production deployment case studies. Evaluation & Benchmarking Metrics for compound system performance. Reproducibility frameworks and artifact standards. Comparative evaluation methodologies and real-world impact assessment. Conference Leadership ACM CAIS is guided by leading researchers who defined the compound AI systems paradigm—scholars and practitioners from MIT, Stanford, Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, and beyond. Steering Committee Organizing Committee Be part of the inaugural ACM CAIS Join us May 26–29, 2026 in San Jose. Registration is at capacity, but you can join the waitlist. Become a Sponsor Put your organization in front of 500+ researchers and practitioners defining the future of compound AI systems — from top university labs to industry teams deploying agentic architectures at scale. Gold $20,000 · Silver $12,000 · Bronze $6,000 · À la carte from $1,500