Caribbean AI Summit 2026 — San Juan, Puerto Rico

The Caribbean AI Summit 2026 is a two-day, bilingual (English/Spanish) conference held October 9-10, 2026 at the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan - billed as the first large-scale AI conference in the Caribbean and organized by PRAIC (Puerto Rico AI Community, 1,000+ members) with partners including Enalca, JetBrains and W@W. Expecting up to 1,000 attendees, the summit pairs five keynotes and 20+ sessions across three parallel tracks with a 48-hour hackathon carrying $10,000 in prizes. Its positioning is deliberately geographic and symbolic: Puerto Rico as the bridge between the Caribbean, the United States and Latin America - 3.5 hours from New York, 2.5 from Miami, no passport or currency change - and a venue where Spanish and English coexist with real-time bilingual captioning. This matters now because AI's economic and talent gravity has concentrated in a handful of US and European hubs, leaving the Caribbean and Latin America underserved by major industry gatherings; a flagship summit anchored in San Juan gives regional founders, engineers, students and the diaspora a stage to participate in - rather than merely observe - the current wave, under the event's framing, The Future Starts with Better Questions.

The three tracks are structured for distinct audiences: Business (Lead with AI) covers strategy, finance, health, startups and creative industries for decision-makers; Technical (Compete with AI) covers production AI, hands-on workshops, LLMs, fine-tuning, security and infrastructure for builders; and Learning (The AI starts here) is an entry-level track requiring no prior experience, covering career impact, education, ethics and ecosystem. The agenda runs both days from roughly 8:00am to 6:00pm: opening keynote, three parallel session blocks per day, networking and expo, with the hackathon kicking off the evening of Day 1 and culminating in pitches, demos and a $10K awards ceremony on Day 2; the hackathon theme is AI for Puerto Rico, teams of 2-4 formed on-site, open to ticket holders. Confirmed speakers verified on the official site include Kay Firth-Butterfield (former Head of AI, World Economic Forum) delivering a keynote, Dr. Fabio Duarte (AI Researcher, MIT Senseable City Lab) on the Technical track, and Idoia Salazar (President of OdiseIA) on the Business track; additional speakers are revealed weekly.

The summit explicitly welcomes a broad audience - C-suite leaders, developers and AI engineers, founders and VCs, university students and newcomers, the Puerto Rican diaspora, and the simply AI-curious - with real-time bilingual EN/ES captioning, the 580,000-sq-ft Puerto Rico Convention Center near Condado and Old San Juan, and an 18+ admission policy. There is an open call for speakers via a Google Form (no posted deadline; speakers announced on a weekly cadence), but no academic paper track or peer review - this is a community-and-industry summit, not a research conference. It is a strong fit for anyone building, leading, funding or learning AI in the Caribbean and Latin American region, and for diaspora technologists seeking to reconnect with a fast-emerging local ecosystem at its inaugural flagship moment.