AI tools are everywhere now. In many organizations, the work itself has not changed enough. Teams are prompting more. Pilots have run. Demos have impressed. But the pipeline reviews, reporting packs, customer handoffs, approval chains, and hiring workflows often still look much like they did two years ago.
That gap is what “AI for Work” means, and it is the focus of ODSC AI NYC, a two-day, workshop-driven AI summit on December 2 and 3, 2026, at Jay Conference Center Bryant Park, 109 West 39th Street, in Midtown Manhattan. AI has changed. Workflows have not. These two days are built to close that distance.
The program is organized around the work you do
The program is organized by what you’re responsible for at work, not by model or vendor, and it runs in four tracks.
If you build AI systems, the Build track covers what decides whether agents, copilots, and RAG systems hold up in production: making brittle agent workflows reliable, eval suites your team will keep running, retrieval that works on messy permission-sensitive enterprise data, and choosing models on measured cost, latency, and quality. You leave with practical patterns for observability, evaluation, routing, and system design that you can bring back to your team.
If you run a business function, the AI in Your Workflow track is hands-on with no code required. Sales, marketing, finance, operations, and HR practitioners work through real tasks from their function and identify where AI can remove friction, improve handoffs, or change the workflow itself. You leave with a working automation, a delegation checklist, and a map of what to automate next in your function and in what order.
If you lead adoption, the Lead track runs working sessions on governance that scales without blocking teams, proving ROI when nobody measured a baseline, and what regulated deployments actually required. You leave with practical approaches to measuring value, managing risk, and helping more than one team adopt AI without starting from scratch each time.
If you use AI daily but haven’t built with it, AI Engineering Fundamentals is a five-session sequence across both days that takes you from a bare API call to a running agent with evals and a cost budget. The sequence is designed to give you direct experience with how AI systems are built, evaluated, and managed in practice.
The two days end by bringing the tracks back together around a practical question: what should your team build, test, change, or stop doing next? A company that sends an engineer, an ops lead, and a director to three different tracks goes home aligned on one plan. That’s why the site says bring your team, and means it.
The room matters
The content is half the value. The other half is two days alongside people solving the same problems you are, which is something no recording or newsletter replaces.
Past ODSC AI events have been joined by practitioners and leaders from organizations including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Bloomberg, Spotify, Databricks, Accenture, and Deloitte, among many others.
The mix is deliberate: engineers next to operators next to executives, and finance next to healthcare next to media. Half the useful conversations at an event like this happen when someone in a different industry describes your exact problem with different words.
The people at the front of the rooms are held to the same standard as the program. Speakers and instructors are practitioners, founders, executives, and technical leaders working on real AI-for-work deployments, and instructors come from the bench that has made ODSC a training organization for over a decade. The people we trained on data science and machine learning in 2016 are the AI leads of 2026, and some of them are now the ones teaching.
The format is built so you actually meet these people. Workshop-scale sessions mean you build alongside the same practitioners for hours, not that you file past them in a keynote hall. Breaks and the evening reception are unstructured on purpose. The Leadership Plus Pass adds the speaker and VIP dinner, which puts you at a table with the instructors and invited guests rather than in a line at a booth. There is no large expo floor, so the event stays weighted toward peers comparing real workflows.
The room is capped at up to 450 people, because working sessions and real conversations both break at convention scale. Small enough that you’ll see the same faces twice. Large enough that someone there has already solved your problem.
Two days, one plan
ODSC AI NYC runs December 2 and 3, 2026, at Jay Conference Center Bryant Park in New York City. Early Bird passes start at $449 for Training and $649 for Leadership Plus and cover the full program, including every workshop and the Fundamentals sequence. Explore the full program and choose your pass. If your organization has AI tools in place but the work itself still needs to change, this is the event for that next stage.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI summit?
An AI summit is a focused, usually multi-day event built around applied artificial intelligence rather than a single vendor or product category, typically combining technical sessions, workshops, and leadership-focused programming for people building and deploying AI systems. ODSC AI NYC is structured this way as an AI for Work Summit, a two-day, workshop-driven program on moving agents, copilots, and AI-powered workflows from pilot to production.
Why is “AI summit 2026” trending?
Interest has grown alongside a shift in what organizations need from these events. Through 2023 and 2024, most AI conferences centered on model capability and early experimentation. By 2026, most organizations have already run pilots, and the open question has become how to move agents, copilots, and AI workflows into governed, reliable production use. That shift, from experimentation to workflow change, is the specific gap ODSC AI NYC is built to address.
Where is ODSC AI NYC being held?
ODSC AI NYC takes place December 2 and 3, 2026, at Jay Conference Center Bryant Park, 109 West 39th Street, in Midtown Manhattan, within walking distance of Bryant Park, Times Square, Penn Station, and Grand Central.
Who is ODSC AI NYC for?
The event is built for AI practitioners, engineers, product leaders, operators, executives, and founders responsible for bringing AI into real workflows, not for one type of role alone. The program runs four tracks so a technical team, a business function, and a leadership group from the same organization can each work through what is relevant to their job and leave aligned on the same plan.
What does the Leadership Plus Pass include?
The Leadership Plus Pass includes everything in the Training Pass, plus access to the speaker and VIP dinner, priority networking opportunities, and access to invited guests, speakers, and partners throughout the two days.