Financial Times Future of AI Summit 2026

The Financial Times returns to Convene, 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London on 4-5 November 2026 for the Future of AI Summit, its flagship two-day gathering on how artificial intelligence is reshaping business, capital and public policy. Organised by FT Live, the summit is built for the newspaper's core readership of chief executives, boards, investors and senior technology leaders, and this edition targets more than 900 attendees with over 80 speakers, the large majority at decision-making level.

The 2026 agenda concentrates on the questions institutional players are actually wrestling with rather than a broad survey of the field. Confirmed themes include sovereign AI infrastructure and the geopolitics of compute, the shift from single models to agentic and multi-agent systems, governance and liability as regulation catches up, and the arrival of physical or embodied AI in the shape of robotaxis and humanoid robots. Running alongside is a persistent thread on AI and the workforce: what changes for hiring, productivity and organisational design as the technology moves from pilots into core operations.

The confirmed line-up reflects that cross-sector framing. Speakers announced at the time of writing include Reid Hoffman of Greylock and Manas AI, Joëlle Pineau of Cohere, Angie Ma of Faculty, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation, Vilas Dhar of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Glenn Fogel of Booking Holdings, Emily Turner of HSBC Innovation Banking UK, and Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. It is a deliberately mixed cast of founders, enterprise operators, investors and researchers, which suits an audience that spans finance, technology, government relations and philanthropy.

For anyone weighing whether to attend, the value here is less about product demonstrations and more about strategic framing: how the people directing large AI budgets and regulatory positions are thinking about the next eighteen months. The summit runs in person at 22 Bishopsgate with a digital pass also available. Pricing is tiered, with in-person delegate rates well above the digital option, so it sits at the premium end of the AI-conference calendar. Registration and the final agenda are on the official FT Live event site, where the speaker roster is still being added to.