ALL IN 2026 — Canada's Largest AI Event

ALL IN returns to Montréal on 16–17 September 2026 at the Palais des congrès, 200 Avenue Viger West. It is the largest AI event in Canada and functions as the annual convening point for the country’s entire AI ecosystem — the research institutes, the scale-ups, the corporate adopters, the investors and the international delegations that come to meet them. The organisers describe the 2026 edition’s ambition as building an AI-powered economy, and the framing is deliberate: ALL IN is less a technical conference than the place where Canadian AI capability gets connected to Canadian capital and Canadian industry.

The scale is real. The organisers report that the event brings together more than 6,500 decision-makers and experts, with over 2,500 companies represented, more than 200 speakers on stage and delegates from over 40 countries, alongside a showcase of the Top 100 Canadian AI startups. For an event that has only been running a handful of years, that concentration is unusual, and it reflects Montréal’s particular position: the city is home to Mila, one of the world’s largest deep-learning research institutes, and a dense cluster of AI companies that grew up around it.

The 2026 speaker programme has not yet been published. The 2025 edition — a fair guide to the level at which ALL IN recruits — featured Yoshua Bengio, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero and founder and scientific adviser of Mila; Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, co-founders of Cohere; Arthur Mensch, co-founder and Chief Executive of Mistral AI; Kari Briski, Vice President for Generative AI Software for Enterprise at NVIDIA; Sasha Luccioni, AI and Climate Lead at Hugging Face; Amba Kak, Co-Executive Director of the AI Now Institute; Mike Murchison, co-founder and Chief Executive of Ada; Abha Dogra, Chief Technology and Product Officer at CAE; Pape Wade, Chief Executive and co-founder of Airudi; and Julien Billot, Chief Executive of Scale AI. Those names are from 2025, not confirmations for 2026, but the pattern is clear: frontier-lab founders, Canadian scale-up chief executives, a serious research presence, and a genuine critical-perspective strand rather than an unbroken run of boosterism.

That last point is worth drawing out, because it distinguishes ALL IN from most national AI showcases. Putting the AI Now Institute and Hugging Face’s climate lead on the same programme as NVIDIA and Mistral is a choice, and it produces a more honest event. Montréal’s AI community has a long-standing intellectual commitment to responsible development — the Montréal Declaration for Responsible AI came out of this city — and ALL IN reflects that inheritance rather than papering over it.

The 2026 edition advertises several dedicated strands alongside the main stage, including an AI Challenge that participants apply to enter, a Smart Cities programme, and an “AI for Real Impact” track focused on deployed use cases rather than demos. The startup dimension is central: the Top 100 Canadian AI startups showcase, combined with the investor presence, makes this the most efficient two days in the year for a Canadian founder raising money or a fund sourcing deals. ALL IN has also expanded nationally, running events in Vancouver in April 2026 and Toronto in May — but Montréal in September remains the flagship.

Practical notes for attendees: the Palais des congrès sits at the edge of Old Montréal and downtown, and the organisers have negotiated rates at hotels within walking distance, including Hôtel Monville on De Bleury Street and the Residence Inn by Marriott Montréal Downtown on Peel Street. Both blocks have booking cut-offs before the event, so book early. Note that the UCI Road World Championships are also in the city, which will put additional pressure on accommodation.

Who it is for: founders, investors, corporate AI and data leaders, policy-adjacent researchers, and anyone who needs to understand or plug into the Canadian AI ecosystem. If your interest is deep technical research, NeurIPS and the Mila seminar programme serve you better. If your interest is turning AI research into a company, a customer or a cheque, ALL IN is the room.