Announcing the 2026 AI and Games Conference | 05/06/26
Speaker submissions are open and early-bird tickets are on sale now!
The AI and Games Conference Returns to London.
Call for submissions is open now until August 3rd.
Early-bird tickets are on sale now.
New venue, new formats, and more to discuss!
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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of AI and Games. I’m back in the UK after spending last week in the US working on-site at non other than Riot Games. We have been running a pilot series of AI training for the studio in recent weeks, and wrapped with an on-site workshop at their LA campus. It was a great experience, and one we hope to return to soon. In the meantime, if you and your organisation are interested in the AI training we do, be sure to check out the dedicated site!
So I’m just about over the jetlag, but the work doesn’t stop as I’ll be flying out to Berlin this weekend as I’m presenting both a Game AI Masterclass for MediaNet BerlinBrandenburg - a networking association for creative technologists - followed by participating in a panel on AI in the creative industries at TedxBerlin! Looking forward to participating in both of these events.
But enough of talking about other people’s events, it’s time to talk about our own! The AI and Games Conference is back for 2026, and given we are announcing the event today I decided to hold off on this week’s issue until today so I could use it fill you in on all of the details and what you need to know.
But first and foremost, the key information that you need is right here:
Dates: Tuesday 10th to Wednesday 11th November 2026
Venue: Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London
Submissions: Call for speakers is now live and is open until August 3rd.
Website: You can follow all the big updates as they happen at: http://www.aiandgamesconference.com
Tickets: Early bird tickets are on sale now while stocks last!
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AI and Games Conference is Back!
That’s right folks the AI and Games Conference returns to London for 2026. We’re very excited to be announcing this years event after a lot of work behind-the-scenes in getting everything lined up. Once again we welcome the Game AI community for two days of presentations from the leading voices in the sector on artificial intelligence in game development.
In the past two years we’ve welcomed over 600 delegates from more than 250 companies around the world to come together and share their work in AI for the games industry. With presentations from Creative Assembly, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, CD Projekt Red, Sony AI, AWS for Games, Unity, Databricks, Ubisoft, Unknown Worlds, Riot Games, Warhorse Studios, Saber Interactive and more.
No hype. No nonsense. Real insights on AI in the video games industry.
Early Bird Tickets On Sale Now
As always, we provide the first round of tickets with an early bird discount, with subsidised tickets for students and indie devs.
Plus we are once again offering t-shirts for pre-order alongside our extra-special ‘Crit’ plushies. Grab them while stocks last!
Special Thanks to Our Sponsors
As always we’re grateful to our sponsors who help us putting this event together. This year we’re giving a big shout-out to Havok, Riot Games, Qualcomm, Creative Assembly, Kythera AI, Raw Power Labs, and Bit.Part.ai. We have a few more companies lining up to support us this year that we hope to announce later this summer. In the meantime if your organisation would like to support us, head over to the website to find out how to get in touch!
We Want To Hear From You
As always we have an open call for speaker submissions that is now live! Whether you’re a game dev ranging from indie to AAA, mobile to console, or a researcher or hobbyist, we want to hear from you. Submissions are open until August 3rd, with each talk being reviewed by our editorial team. Be sure to have a read through the guidelines on what we expect, or check out the talks from 2024 and 2025 now live on YouTube which give you an indication of our expectations and quality bar. Last year we had a 35% acceptance rate. So let me stress the competition is fierce (and increasing year-on-year) but we’re open to the weird, the wonderful, and the interesting.
A Change of Scenery
The big change for 2026 is that we have moved venue! We’re still in London, but decided to pop over to the other side of the Thames. We’re incredibly grateful to the good folks at Goldsmith’s University who have hosted us these past two years; they have been great partners and very accommodating as we tried to figure out what this event is shaping up to be. However, we have reached a point we have sadly outgrown the space. This is largely due to the level of enthusiasm and excitement you have shown for the event. In year one we had to close ticket sales one week out as interest exceeded capacity and we had very real concerns about violating fire safety (yes, that happened), and in year two we moved into the Great Hall to address our need for more floor space, only for us to still have challenges in balancing room sizes.
To that end myself and our event manager Sally Kevan have spent the past few months wandering the streets of London to find a new space to call home. Both to help us find our footing in a space that can accomodate us, but potentially help us grow in sensible ways. To that end we’re glad to be partnering with Here East: London’s campus for entrepreneurs, creatives, and unconventional thinkers.
Based in Hackney in East London, Here East is situated in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and is a part of the post-Olympic regeneration project for the area. The Here East campus itself is a revamp of the former Olympic Media Centre that was built on the site for the 2012 games. On that note, many of the sites originally built for the 2012 Olympics, ranging from the Copper Box Arena, the London Aquatics Club, and famously London Stadium - now home to the (sadly recently relegated) football team West Ham United - are only 10 minutes walk from our new venue.
But it’s not just a venue space. As you can see in the video above there are a variety of coffee shops, restaurants and other amenities right next to where we’re going to be based. In addition there are excellent transport links with Hackney Wick on the Overground only 10 mins walk, and Stratford providing services via Network Rail, London Overground, London Underground and the DLR - which is only 25 minutes walk or a 5-minute (free) shuttle bus away from the venue.
We are hosted at Here East at Plexal, which is an innovation and coworking space. This provides us with a series of rooms that provide both the space we need for hosting talks while also allowing for overflow - where we can now stream the talks locally. This means should a session popular we can then have a video running in a neighbouring area complete with headsets for you to listen along. In addition we’re grateful to the team at University of Staffordshire London whose Digital Institute campus is also based at Here East, and are collaborating with us in delivering this event. The University of Staffordshire is the UK’s #1 rated university for games, with their courses a certified partner for industry tools such as Houdini and Unreal Engine, and winner of the TIGA Games Industry award for best educational institution the past two years running. Supporting and nurturing future generations of the Game AI community is an important mission for us, and so to collaborate with Staffs makes a lot of sense.
A Word From The Lead Organiser
[That’s me by the way…]
Once is luck, twice is a coincidence, but three times is when you build a routine.
In the two and a bit years since we formed Game AI Events CIC - the non-profit organisation that runs the AI and Games Conference - we have not only been blown away by the response we have received from the Game AI community (not to mention the wider industry) but the landscape in which it exists has also shifted.
We exist in an age where the conversation on AI for games is never-ending - I mean we write a weekly newsletter just to help you keep up to date! Now more than ever there is a need for an event that provides high-quality and meaningful discourse on the positive (and negative) impact of these technologies to the sector. To show how game developers are actually using AI to solve their problems, and to shine a light on the best professional practice that will help us thrive as both a creative medium, and a technology-driven sector.
When my friends and I founded this venture, it was to address what we felt was a clear gap in the market. To provide a European event for AI developers in games, be they working with traditional Game AI systems, to the latest innovations in Machine Learning. By providing a space to come together and share their experiences, we can not just cater to an audience in our own neighbourhood who were starved for a local event, but to combat the narratives surrounding AI’s adoption in the industry. We exist in an age where Game AI is largely ignored, and sensible applications of Machine Learning (and even Generative AI) are tarred with the same brush as many of the worst out there. It makes it difficult for people who already work in AI to have meaningful conversation, and for those beginning to understand why and how we use AI in games to get an accurate representation. AI for games is a long-running and storied field, and it’s important that we remain resolute in showcasing best practice and meaningful iteration without playing into the hype, or placating short-sighted and detrimental efforts that masquerade as ‘progress’.
As you can imagine, this is a tough balancing act, and it’s one we don’t just debate internally, but continue to listen to our community such that we try to get it right. But for us the most important thing has been the sense of community and the overall vibe of our events. I’m incredibly proud of what we have delivered in but two short years as we’ve gone from ‘dumb idea conceived in a bar at GDC’ to one of the largest events on AI for the video games industry in the world!
Despite this amazing growth, our ambition is not ever-increasing ticket sales. Rather, it is about stability. We welcomed around 400 developers in 2025, and while this isn’t ‘big’ in comparison to other events last year such as the UK’s Develop (5,500), Poland’s GIC (3,400), Gamescom Dev (5,400) or GDC (25,000) , this now puts us in the space of a ‘small but large’ event in this sector. We’re now larger than a lot of other game developer events that get hosted in the UK and specifically in London - which is insane btw - and that means finding venues that fit and spaces that can accomodate has became a very big problem in a short period of time. Our budgets continue to grow at a time where we’re still finding our feet economically - full disclosure I anticipate our 2026 budget will be 3-4x what it cost us to run the first event in 2024. Meanwhile we’re still a very young endeavour, and it takes time for word to get out about the value our event presents to corporate sponsors. Hence it’s still a lot of work to get on the radar of potential sponsors and convince them to support us. While in some regards things are moving quickly, in others it moves slowly. However I am glad to say we’re getting there and that the word has got out as more companies see what we’re aiming for and align with it. A huge thank you once again to all of our sponsors who support us in what we’ve set out to do.
In addition it’s worth stressing the 5-year plan is not to scale this event to 800 or 1000 attendees. This would run risk of diluting the vibe and sense of community we have established. Rather we have ambitions not to expand in headcount but instead deepen our offerings. It’s too early to state now, but in 2026 we are looking to try some new ideas in our programme, and allow us to enrich the conversations at the event. Some prototypes if you will that will help us prove out ideas as part of our proposed plans for 2027 and beyond. More on that as it comes!
But to return to my opening statement, our ambition is to become a tradition. That we are the venue people serious about AI in game development will visit. The home of meaningful discussions and valued insight. A space where everyone from academia to AAA is welcome and will engage with one another. That means we have to be serious about how we set ourselves up for the future. Today’s announcement is the end of a long couple of months as everything lines up where we want it to be. But is also the start of the real work. Of making this event happen, and ensuring we continue to live up to our own standards, and to deliver for all of you out there.
Thanks once again to everyone out there backing this horse, and I look forward to greeting many of you in person this November.
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For all of our premium subscribers of this here newsletter, check your inbox for an email from us today which provides a discount code on your ticket! It’s a discount that pays for itself at this point.