QCon AI New York 2026 Opens Registration: Production-First Conference for AI Engineers

Registration is now open for QCon AI New York 2026, a two-day conference scheduled for December 15–16 at The Westin Jersey City Newport. Unlike industry events aimed at organizations still evaluating AI adoption, this event targets senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders actively operating AI systems in live environments.

Focus on Real-World Production Challenges#

The conference organizes its program across six core topics that reflect the friction points teams encounter as AI projects graduate from prototypes to production workloads:

• Agent runtime design — managing state, recovery mechanisms, and approval gates for extended-running agents
• Context engineering — optimizing how AI systems retrieve and process contextual information
• Evals and observability — measuring model behavior and system health in production
• MCP and tool access — connecting agents to external resources safely and effectively
• Zero-trust security for tool-using agents — defending systems where AI makes autonomous decisions
• Inference cost and latency — balancing performance and economics at scale

Program Leadership and Selection Process#

The program is chaired by Eder Ignatowicz, Senior Principal Software Engineer and Architect at Red Hat AI, who also led the earlier QCon AI Boston event. He is joined by Faye Zhang, Staff Software Engineer and GenAI search tech lead at Google, and Wes Reisz, Technical Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and co-host of The InfoQ Podcast.

The selection committee vets every proposal through a strict lens: speakers must have hands-on experience running these systems and models in production, and sessions must balance lessons learned from both successes and failures. Talks are selected by the practitioner committee and are invitation-only. The final schedule excludes vendor pitches and sponsored content.

Timeline and Next Steps#