Every conference this year has asked whether the technology works. That question is settled. The more useful one—the one worth clearing a day for—is what happens to your company, your industry, and the institutions meant to govern all of it now that it does.

That’s the premise of Techonomy 26, which we’re holding on Tuesday, October 6, in San Francisco. The theme is Intelligence at Scale: what changes when AI stops being a feature and becomes infrastructure.

The distinction matters. A feature is something you evaluate, budget for, and switch off if it disappoints. Infrastructure is something you build on top of—and once you have, the questions stop being about capability and start being about dependency, security, cost, power, and accountability when it fails. Most organizations are still having procurement conversations about something that has already become load-bearing.

Who’s confirmed

A first look at the program:

  • Jack Hidary (SandboxAQ)—why the next leap isn’t a bigger language model. His large quantitative models run on physics and chemistry rather than text, and they’re already in production.
  • Ryan Panchadsaram (Kleiner Perkins, co-author of Speed & Scale)—the power and materials problem underneath the boom. Energy is the real ceiling.
  • Udbhav Tiwari (Signal)—the case that agentic AI, as currently built, quietly undoes what encryption was supposed to guarantee.
  • Tom Kellermann (TrendAI)—autonomous malware, deepfake fraud, and the fact that most enterprises can’t name the agents already running inside them.
  • Liz Centoni (Cisco)—what AI is actually fixing at scale, from someone running a $15 billion services business and refreshingly allergic to hype.
  • Jaime Teevan (Microsoft)—what building Microsoft 365 Copilot taught her about how people and machines really split the work.
  • Dr. Vivienne Ming (The Human Trust)—the counter-argument that more intelligence is the wrong goal.
  • Bill Gross (ProRata.ai) and Phil Radford (Consumer Reports)—who gets paid when AI answers the question, and who’s looking out for the person asking it.

Plus Mei Lin Fung on what the internet’s first 50 years should teach us about governing AI’s first ten, and Lu Zhang of Fusion Fund on where the money is actually going. More to come.

Read that list again, and you’ll notice it doesn’t agree with itself. Hidary and Panchadsaram are building the layer underneath; Tiwari and Kellermann are describing what breaks when you do. Centoni is unromantic about what’s working today; Ming argues the whole objective is misspecified. That disagreement is the program, not a scheduling accident.

The format

Techonomy has never been a stage-and-audience event, and this one won’t be either. It’s a working forum: structured conversations, off-the-record sessions, and enough cross-sector collision that enterprise buyers, founders, investors, and policy people are actually in the same conversation rather than three parallel ones. We keep it to 150 to 200 people for exactly that reason.

The details

  • Event: Techonomy 26
  • Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
  • Location: San Francisco Bay Area
  • Theme: Intelligence at Scale—what changes when AI moves from feature to infrastructure
  • Format: Invitation-only working forum. 150–200 executives, founders, investors, and policymakers.
  • Cost: Complimentary for confirmed guests
  • Presenting partner: Northern Trust
  • Details and invitation requests: worth.com/event/techonomy-2026

We keep the room small on purpose, so the list closes well before October. If you’re building this, funding it, deploying it, or writing the rules for it, request an invitation, and we’ll confirm.