QCon AI New York 2026 opens registration for a two-day conference focused on teams operating AI systems in production. The event will take place December 15–16 at the Westin Jersey City Newport, a PATH ride from Lower Manhattan, and is aimed squarely at senior software engineers, architects, and engineering leaders responsible for real-traffic AI deployments.
A production-focused program
The QCon AI New York 2026 program is organized around six practical production challenges: agent runtime design (state management, recovery, and approval boundaries for long‑lived agents), context engineering, evals and observability, model and tool access (MCP and tool access), zero‑trust security for agents using tools, and inference cost and latency. Each theme targets the problems teams face once an AI feature moves beyond a proof of concept and must scale reliably in production.
Content governance and selection criteria
The program committee is chaired by Eder Ignatowicz (Senior Principal Software Engineer and Architect, Red Hat AI), joined by Faye Zhang (Staff Software Engineer, Google) and Wes Reisz (Technical Principal Consultant, Thoughtworks). Proposals are judged against two strict questions: Has the speaker actually operated the systems and models in production? And will they discuss what didn’t work? Sessions are invitation-only and chosen by this committee of practitioners; the main track contains no sponsored talks or commercial product pitches.
Format, interaction, and timeline
Beyond presentations, the event reserves time for practitioners and speakers to debate operational decisions — agent boundaries, eval strategies, security, cost control, and more. QCon AI New York 2026 is the second of two QCon AI events in 2026 (following Boston earlier in the year) and follows the practitioner-first approach QCon has emphasized for more than twenty years. Initial session announcements are expected in August, a preliminary program will appear in October, and the full lineup will be published in early November.
More information and registration details are available on the QCon AI New York 2026 event page.
