QCon AI New York 2026 (December 15-16) has opened registration, returning to the New York area at The Westin Jersey City Newport, one PATH stop from Lower Manhattan. The two-day conference is built for senior software engineers, architects, and engineering leaders who own AI systems running in production, rather than teams still deciding whether to adopt AI.
The program committee has organized the program around six areas of production AI:
- Agent runtime design, covering state ownership, recovery, and approval boundaries for long-running agents
- Context engineering
- Evals and observability
- MCP and tool access
- Zero-trust security for tool-using agents
- Inference cost and latency
Each addresses a problem teams tend to hit once an AI feature moves past a demo and has to survive real traffic in production.
The program is chaired by Eder Ignatowicz, Senior Principal Software Engineer and Architect at Red Hat AI, who also chaired QCon AI Boston earlier this year. He's joined by Faye Zhang, Staff Software Engineer and GenAI search tech lead at Google, and Wes Reisz, Technical Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and creator and co-host of The InfoQ Podcast.
The committee reviews every proposed session against two questions: whether the speaker has run the systems and models in production, and whether they will discuss what didn't work alongside what did. Sessions are chosen by the practitioner committee and are invite-only; the main schedule carries no sponsored talks or product pitches.
QCon AI New York is the second of two QCon AI events on the 2026 calendar, following QCon AI Boston earlier this year, and applies the practitioner-led approach QCon has used for more than 20 years.
Outside the scheduled talks, the event is structured to give attendees time to discuss key topics with speakers and other engineers working on production AI systems, including decisions related to agent boundaries, evals, security, and cost controls.
The first sessions are expected to be announced in August, with a preliminary schedule in October and the complete program published by early November.
More information and registration details are available at QCon AI New York.