QCon AI New York 2026: Registration Opens for December 15-16 Production-AI Conference
Quick Answer
Registration is now open for QCon AI New York 2026, a specialized conference for senior engineers focusing on production AI systems.
Quick Take
Scheduled for December 15-16, it will address critical areas like agent runtime design and zero-trust security, with sessions led by industry experts from Red Hat and Google.
Key Points
- Event scheduled for December 15-16 at The Westin Jersey City Newport.
- Focus areas include agent runtime design, , and zero-trust security.
- Sessions are invite-only, emphasizing real-world production experiences.
- First sessions to be announced in August, with a complete program by November.
- Attendees will have opportunities for discussions with speakers on production AI challenges.
DeepSignal Analysis
What happened
Registration has opened for QCon AI New York 2026, a conference scheduled for December 15-16, focusing on production AI systems. The event will feature sessions on topics such as agent runtime design and zero-trust security, led by experts from Red Hat and Google.
Key evidence
- The conference will take place at The Westin Jersey City Newport, just one PATH stop from Lower Manhattan.
- The program committee has organized sessions around six areas of production AI, including context engineering and inference cost.
- Eder Ignatowicz, a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat AI, chairs the program committee, which emphasizes practical experience in production systems.
Why it matters
This conference targets senior engineers and leaders who manage AI systems in production, addressing challenges that arise when AI features transition from demonstration to real-world application. The focus on practical insights from experienced professionals may provide valuable guidance for attendees facing similar issues in their own implementations.
What to watch
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readQCon AI New York 2026 (December 15-16) has opened registration, returning to the New York area at The Westin Jersey City Newport, one PATH stop from Lower Manhattan. The two-day conference is built for senior software engineers, architects, and engineering leaders who own AI systems running in production, rather than teams still deciding whether to adopt AI.
The program committee has organized the program around six areas of production AI:
- Agent runtime design, covering state ownership, recovery, and approval boundaries for long-running agents
- Context engineering
- Evals and observability
- MCP and tool access
- Zero-trust security for tool-using agents
- Inference cost and latency
Each addresses a problem teams tend to hit once an AI feature moves past a demo and has to survive real traffic in production.
The program is chaired by Eder Ignatowicz, Senior Principal Software Engineer and Architect at Red Hat AI, who also chaired QCon AI Boston earlier this year. He's joined by Faye Zhang, Staff Software Engineer and GenAI search tech lead at Google, and Wes Reisz, Technical Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and creator and co-host of The InfoQ Podcast.
The committee reviews every proposed session against two questions: whether the speaker has run the systems and models in production, and whether they will discuss what didn't work alongside what did. Sessions are chosen by the practitioner committee and are invite-only; the main schedule carries no sponsored talks or product pitches.
QCon AI New York is the second of two QCon AI events on the 2026 calendar, following QCon AI Boston earlier this year, and applies the practitioner-led approach QCon has used for more than 20 years.
Outside the scheduled talks, the event is structured to give attendees time to discuss key topics with speakers and other engineers working on production AI systems, including decisions related to agent boundaries, evals, security, and cost controls.
The first sessions are expected to be announced in August, with a preliminary schedule in October and the complete program published by early November.
More information and registration details are available at QCon AI New York.
About the Author
Artenisa Chatziou
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— Originally published at infoq.com
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