The First Wave of AI and Games Conference Talks | 26/09/25
A bonus issue because there's so many talks to announce for this year's event!
AWS presenting on optimising LLMs for game productions
Electronic Arts returns with talks on AI research in AAA gaming, and NHL 26
Ubisoft joins us for 2025 with talks on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows
Presentations on AI for game accessibility, an investor panel, plus an update on the legal situation in 2025 and beyond!
The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Plus summarising all of our content released across various channels, like our YouTube videos and in-person events like the AI and Games Conference.
You can subscribe to and support AI and Games, with weekly editions appearing in your inbox. If you'd like to work with us on your own games projects, please check out our consulting services. To sponsor, please visit the dedicated sponsorship page.
Hang on a minute, what’s this? A Friday issue of the AI and Games newsletter? Well, first off happy Friday all, and may your weekend be restful and rewarding. With this week’s content handled by our inaugural issue of The Take, we didn’t get to cover the regular announcements and the news. But the problem is we have so much to announce with our every own AI and Games Conference 2025 just weeks away from kicking off in London!
So to that end, this is a small bonus issue where I take a moment to highlight every talk we have announced on other social media platforms, but have not had the spotlight yet in this here publication.
Tickets Are On Sale Now: You can visit the conference website to find out more, with accessible ticket prices for indie studios and students.
Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok
Previously Announced Talks
So very quickly, before I dig into all of the other talks we’ve announced, let’s quickly summarise the four talks we introduced in our previous issues of the newsletter:
Retro-AI: Dungeon Keeper / Ian Shaw
A post-mortem almost 30 years in the making on the beloved PC game from 1997.
Heat, Maxtac, and Blockades: Expanding the Police System in Cyberpunk 2077 / Maciej Celmer, CD Projekt Red
We hear about the developments that enable for the new MaxTax police encounters in the big post-launch update to Cyberpunk 2077.
One Trillion Parameters and No Plans / Jeff Orkin, BitPart.ai
A deep-dive into how viable large language models are in planning AI, and really how it makes sense to use LLMs to build planning models.
How to Build a Friend: AI Companionship and its Game Design Potential / Olga Titova, Wargaming
A look at the design of NPCs with a perspective on user experience and player psychology.
For our initial announcements we wanted to give a bit of flavour to what you can expect at the conference this year. A bit of a spread of classic games, big budget AAA titles, generative AI innovations, and stuff slightly outside the traditional sphere.
So let’s get into what else you can expect to see at our 2025 event.
An Electronic Arts Double-Bill
We’re excited to welcome Electronic Arts back to the AI and Games Conference for a second year in a row. In fact, our first EA talk is also from a returning speaker!
Bringing Research to Life in AAA Game Production
Alessandro Sestini, Electronic Arts
Alessandro Sestini returns to the AI and Games Conference to give a presentation on how SEED - the research division at EA - operates within the broader organisation. This talk was previously delivered at the AI and Games Summer School earlier this year and Alessandro offered to present it again for us. It’s a great insight into the workings of their team, and we’ve deliberately scheduled it next to the other EA talk!
Diversity in Autonomous Playtesting: A Case Study on Reinforcement Learning for NHL26
Florian Fuchs, Electronic Arts
Florian Fuchs from EA SEED will be giving a talk on using reinforcement learning for playtesting and give us a breakdown of their efforts to employ the technology in NHL 26! AI for playtesting continues to be a growing area of interest in the sector, and this proposes some new approaches to tackling well-worn problems.
AWS for Games Returns to Discuss Small (Large) Language Models
Last year we welcomed AWS for Games not only as one of our partner sponsors, but also with a great presentation from Arya Subramanyam and Andrei Muratov on agentic frameworks for game development. This year Andrei returns alongside Patrick Palmer to talk about the big story of the moment: large language models.
From Cloud to Edge: Optimising Small Language Models for Game Applications on AWS
Patrick Palmer, Andrei Muratov, AWS
Patrick and Andrei will be presenting how to build small language models using the AWS pipeline. Showing you how to fine-tune, distil & run LLMs on device for responsive (and private) AI deployment!
We Welcome Ubisoft to the AI and Games Conference
Ubisoft continues to be one of the biggest players not just in the industry, but also in research and innovation around AI deployment. So I’m excited to say we have two different talks on good ol’fashioned game AI from one of the biggest players in the sector.
The illusion of life - Managing NPCs in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Martin Weusten, Ubisoft Dusseldorf
Martin will be sharing his experiences in building NPC systems for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. This talk is focussed on how the team implemented Level of Detailing (LOD) systems to help manage the volume of Na’vi NPCs that could be in the game world at once. With the solution they built doubling the final virtual headcount while in game.
Let the NPCs Fight: Learning Attack Reach from Real Gameplay Data
Vincent Martineau, Ubisoft
Plus we welcome Vincent Martineau from Ubisoft who is going to be talking about a really interesting problem: ensuring attack ranges in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows match the character models and animations of the wide range of NPCs you meet across the open world. I’m really enjoying playing Shadows at the moment, and so now I’m paying extra attention to those attack animations. I want to be primed for the talk!
Big Game AI Challenges
While the move towards machine learning and generative AI is ongoing, and a big push for the industry as a whole, there are still plenty of big challenges that face classic game AI. So don’t worry, we got your back!
How to Power-up Unreal Engine Behavior Trees
Antonio Muñoz Gallego, Unknown Worlds
We welcome Antonio Muñoz Gallego from Unknown Worlds Entertainment: a studio that has hit its stride in recent years with the Subnautica series. Antonio will be talking about his experiences in getting the best out of Unreal’s behaviour tree tools. Including integrating utility AI as part of the behaviour tree setup, using the gameplay ability system (GAS) to decouple the execution of BTs from the logic, and how to make things more modular and design friendly for multiplayer games.
The Living World AI Recipe Book: Practical Insights for Ambient Character Simulation
Pablo Armando Rodríguez Codes, Avalanche Studios Group
Pablo Armando Rodriguez Codes from Avalanche studios coming to talk about lessons learned from simulation large numbers of NPCs at once. How to inject a bit of believability into open world games, and how to ensure it scales in ways that maintain good performance.
Latent Landscapes: Using machine learning to generate terrain in Prologue: Go Wayback!
Joey Faulkner, PlayerunknownProductions
A classic problem, with a different approach! Procedural content generation is always challenging when we wish to generate various artifacts that retain quality and diversity. So why not try approaching it using machine learning? Joey Faulkner tells us about the work PlayerUnknown Productions have been developing for their upcoming survival title Prologue: Go Wayback!
Also, gotta love a good pun in a talk title (if you know, you know).
Accessibility, Investment, and the Law!
While our focus is very much on work that engineers will find valuable - by hearing from their peers in shipping product and conducting research - it’s important we use our platform to engage with some of the other big issues and application areas that surround AI in the games industry nowadays. I’m glad to say that we continue to do that for this year’s event.
Press A for Assistance: Making Games Accessible with AI
Veronica Reingold and Steven Rice, University of Windsor
If there is one subject that I’m always excited to see: it’s people exploring AI for accessibility! Veronica Reingold and Steven Rice from the University of Windsor will be presenting an overview of potential avenues for adopting AI in supporting accessibility features for players, with deep-dives into specific application areas.
Panel: Investment Trends at the Intersection of AI and Games
Moderated by Cassia Curran, Curran Games Agency
I had the pleasure of seeing Cassia Curran present in an investment panel at a BAFTA Games event earlier this year. Plus of course we interviewed Cassia in a recent issue of the AI and Games newsletter. And now I’m happy to say she will be chairing a session on investment in the space between games and AI: two areas with rather contrasting investment strategies in recent years.
Navigating Legal Frontiers: How the Law applies to AI in 2025
Rupam Davé, Lewis Silkin LLP
We welcome back Rupam Dave who presented on the state of AI and the law (for games) at our event last year. Rupam continues to be one of the leading legal professionals in the state of AI around the entertainment sector in the UK. This year he’s returning to give us an update on where things are going across the US/UK/EU and what to be aware of going forward!
That’s Just the Start!
We’re only just getting started! We haven’t even announced 50% of the programme yet! But I hope you agree it’s going to be a fantastic event. I won’t like I was pinching myself when some of these submissions came in.
What else do we have to expect? Well, you can expect even more presentations announced in the coming weeks from:
AAA studios Creative Assembly and Riot have some fun stuff to share.
AI middleware companies Havok and Kythera take the stage.
We hear about new developments from both Arm and Databricks!
Raw Power Labs share their experiences in building small-scale AI models.
Generative AI games companies Meaning Machine and Studio Atelico will be joining us.
Google are popping by to say a few things.
Tickets are on sale now, and we offer bulk discounts to teams sendingh groups of 5 or more to event. Head on over to the conference website to find out more!
Back Next Week
And with that, I’ll retire for the week - ha, who am I kidding? I have work to do. But next week the newsletter returns to our regular cadence, with a dedicated issue to catch up on all the news from the past couple of weeks.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Wednesday!