About the Event

TEDAI Vienna 2026 runs October 28-30, 2026, at the Hofburg palace in Vienna. It's one of two official TED Conferences taking place this year and the only one outside North America, curated and organized by Dr. Alina Nikolaou and the TEDx team in collaboration with TED.

Audience & Attendees

The event draws over 1,100 guests from more than 65 countries and 820 organizations, with about one in three attendees at executive level. Confirmed 2026 speakers include Geoffrey Hinton, Nicholas Thompson (CEO, The Atlantic), Cory Doctorow, Mido Assran, Peter Steinberger, Yukiyasu Kamitani, Valeria Pettorino, Layla Hosseini-Gerami, and César Rodriguez-Garavito. Past speakers have included Jürgen Schmidhuber, Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Swami Sivasubramanian (AWS), and Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO).

Programme Structure

The conference opens October 28 with a black-tie Opening Gala of music and dancing. October 29, Discovery Day, offers discovery sessions, outdoor Idea Adventures, panels, and Dine Around dinners at restaurants across Vienna. October 30, Talks Day, is the main TED Theatre programme with more than 20 curated TED Talks, closing with an afterparty.

Main Topics

Talks are grouped under themes including AI & Agents, AI & Safety, AI & Brain, AI & Galaxies, AI & War, AI & World Models, AI & Political Economy, AI & Drug Discovery, AI & Music, and AI & Environmental Law.

Closing Session

Talks Day on October 30 closes the conference with more than 20 TED Talks in the TED Theatre, followed by an afterparty with music and dancing.

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