TEDAI 2026 — The Official TED Conference on AI
📅 Wednesday, 28 October 2026 → Friday, 30 October 2026 in 133 days
TED's official European AI conference returns to Vienna's Hofburg palace for three days of TED Talks, debates, workshops and live demos on AI's future.
TEDAI Vienna 2026 is TED's official European conference dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, held at the Hofburg imperial palace in central Vienna. Across three days it pairs the familiar TED format — a Talks Day with 20+ curated, fact-checked talks — with discovery sessions, spotlight panels, live demos, hands-on workshops and the famously social side of a TED event. For an attendee the rhythm is deliberate: October 28 opens with a black-tie gala styled after a Viennese ball; October 29 is Discovery Day, with sessions, panels, outdoor "Ideas Adventures" and curated AI dinners across the city; October 30 is Talks Day in the TED Theatre, closing with an afterparty.
The 2026 lineup leans on heavyweight AI names. Geoffrey Hinton appears under the theme "AI & Safety"; Mido Assran (world-model architect) speaks on "AI & World Models"; brain-decoding researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani on "AI & Brain"; Nicholas Thompson (CEO, The Atlantic) on "AI & Safety"; and Peter Steinberger on "AI & Agents," alongside contributors framing AI against war, digital labour and cosmology. Discovery leaders run workshops on AI lie detection, digital afterlife and AI filmmaking, so the programme spans technical frontier work and AI's cultural and ethical edges.
This is unmistakably an ideas-and-society conference rather than a hands-on engineering one. Past speakers have included Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind), Lukasz Kaiser (OpenAI), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Jurgen Schmidhuber, and the audience is international and senior — the organisers cite 1,100+ guests from 65+ countries, with roughly one in three an executive. Industries represented range across technology, media, science, healthcare, finance and policy.
Passes are premium and all-inclusive of meals, the gala and parties: an Early Supporter tier at EUR 1,000 (sold out), Standard at EUR 1,500, with Group, Executive Track (application only, EUR 2,500) and Donor (EUR 4,000) options. It is an 18+ event. For anyone who wants a high-signal, cross-disciplinary read on where AI is heading — delivered in TED's polished talk format inside one of Europe's grandest venues — TEDAI Vienna is a flagship date on the calendar.
