AI Conf 2026: Thank you, and a behind-the-scenes look at how it came together
400+ attendees; Nepal's premier conference for people building the future with AI
AI Conf 2026 is a wrap, and tbh weâre still riding the post-conference glow1.
To everyone who attended: thank you so much for showing up with curiosity, enthusiasm and energy.
To our speakers: thank you for your interesting and wide ranging talks, your stories, and for interacting with everyone until late at night (and in the next day hike!)
To our sponsors and partners, thank you for contributing to the community by making it possible for the conference to exist.
This post will be part celebration, part âhow it wentâ and part a behind-the-scenes look at all the stuff that led to the conference. Hopefully it is as fun to read as it was for us to write, and also acts like a sort of blueprint for anyone who wants to organize tech conferences in Nepal (if you end up doing that, please let us know, we would love to attend!)
tl;dr - Some photos; Why organize AI Conf; Timeline with fun notable events; Asides: Sponsors, Tickets, Venue, Speakers; Plan for this Substack going forward (expect a post a month about AI and everything wwktm)
AI (non-use) disclosure: Not gonna lie, we did use AI extensively throughout the conference, from vibe-coding custom apps for it, to helping with our social media, and more. However, this blog post has been written the old-fashioned way â painstakingly by a human by hand2
The highlight reel
Here are a few moments we captured ourselves. Official photos coming soon (weâll email you as soon as we have them!) Edit: You shouldâve received a Google Drive link in an email from us.
Why AI Conf
There were two questions behind AI Conf.
The first was why we felt the need to organize a flagship, international-grade tech conference in Nepal again.
The second was why we chose to focus it on AI.
The AI part came first.
Over the last few years, WWKTM has been running monthly meetups on a wide range of topics. Sometimes they were about engineering, sometimes product, sometimes marketing. But no matter what we started with, conversations kept drifting toward AI.
People wanted to understand how to use AI well, how to build with it, and what it actually meant for their work beyond the hype. That lined up with what we were seeing ourselves. In a relatively short span of time, our day-to-day work, and in some cases our roles entirely, had changed because of AI.
AI doesnât feel like just another trend or a Gartner hype cycle entry. It feels like something fundamental about how we work is shifting, and the scary/fun thing is that it is shaking our industry first.
At the same time, modern AI systems are not tools in the traditional sense. Unlike tools that are deliberately engineered, these systems are opaque black boxes that are grown from massive amounts of data, and nobody fully understands their capabilities or limits yet. Best practices are still emerging, mostly through experimentation and learning from other builders. You can do some of that online, of course, but what we felt was missing was the ability to learn and compare notes in person with others facing similar problems.
There were already AI-related conferences and events happening in Nepal, but most leaned toward theory, policy, or general awareness. Those spaces matter. But they werenât built for people actively building products and systems with AI. We wanted something shaped around practitioners: engineers, designers, product folks, and builders who were already in the middle of figuring things out.
So we decided to create the conference we wanted to attend.
Conferences also arenât just about what you learn from the talks. Over the years, through WWKTM events, weâve seen people meet future teammates, find their next job, or start working on ideas that began as a hallway conversation. Bringing people with shared interests into the same room creates opportunities that are hard to replicate elsewhere, and we wanted to make space for that again.
The other part of the question, why a community-driven flagship conference for professionals in Nepal, came from a longer-standing gap. WWKTM had organized large conferences back in 2018 and 2019, and even years later people still brought them up. Not because of any single talk, but because of the overall experience and the kinds of conversations they enabled. We kept hearing variations of the same question: when are you doing something like that again?
Since then, there have been many good tech events. But as attendees ourselves, we often felt that something was missing. Events were either too narrowly scoped, tied closely to a single company or platform, or primarily designed as training for students. Those formats have their place, but they werenât the kinds of spaces we wanted to spend a full day in as working professionals.
What we wanted was a community-driven conference for practitioners. Something company-agnostic. Something that didnât revolve around a single vendor or ecosystem, especially in a field like AI where tools and best practices change quickly. That also meant no sponsored talks and no pay-to-play content.
AI Conf was our attempt to bring back the kind of WWKTM conference the community had loved before, updated for where we are now.
Timeline
The goal behind this timeline is to provide a behind-the-scenes look at some of the things that go into organizing a conference. Hopefully it can also come in handy to any aspiring organizers in the future.3
The main sources for this timeline were our Slack and a git archaeology session by Claude Code4.
Before getting into the timeline, itâs worth saying this upfront: a lot of what made AI Conf possible doesnât show up cleanly in a list of dates and milestones.
This conference didnât come together because of a single organization or a small core team alone. Members of the community helped in many practical ways along the way: connecting us with speakers and sponsors, sharing the event widely, helping sell tickets, and stepping in wherever help was needed.
The timeline below captures decisions and moments we can point to, but it misses many of these smaller, often behind-the-scenes contributions that made the conference possible in practice.
August & before: seed of an idea
Aug & before - Murmurings in the wwktm slack begin. Unsure about the timelines but discussions started very soon right after we finished organizing BarCamp Ktm 2025. During this time, we are tentative, unsure, but still excited.5
Aug 23 - First commit in the website repo
Aug 29 - Soft launch to Tech Kura Kani6 attendees during Baibhavâs âAdventures in Vibe Codingâ Tech Kura Kani session
Dec 20-21, 2025 - the original planned event date
Aug 31 - First todo list (probably?). Has todos for âKickoff designsâ, âReview CFP website & formâ, âSponsorship brochureâ, âfigure out ticketing platformâ and also fun stuff like âmaybe a chatbot for AI Conf??â
September: Shit hits the fan
Sep 8-9 - GenZ protests happened in Nepal
This led to us first postponing the announcement of the event and later postponing the event itself
October: 2025â2026 and announcement
Oct 8 - The Big Date Change: the event changed from âAI Conf 2025â to âAI Conf 2026â (from Dec 20-21, 2025 to Jan 10-11, 2026)
Oct 11 - Announced AI Conf & Call for Speakers via newsletter. Also, social media work started: profile & cover photos updated to AI Conf with new date!
Oct 15 - Call for Speakers announced (with deadline of Nov 15) via social, papercall, etc
Oct 29 - Lots of internal work going on: discussions re finalizing ticket prices, reviewing speakers, venue scouting 4 places, sponsorship meetings
November: Systems, Sponsors, Believers
Nov 2 - community.wwktm.com: Our very own Discourse server
Until Nov 8 - Old ticketing system (we were planning on google form with QR and manual verification)
Nov 9 - Avinash dai got nerd-sniped and we now have a new ticketing system! (100% vibe coded, what could go wrong?)
Nov 9 - Subash dai got the idea for Name wall (turned out to be a massive hit on the conf day, and count me biased, but ours looked quite a bit better đ)
Nov 11 - First sponsors appeared on the site: Programiz, Game Machine Labs, and Lovable joined as initial supporters.
Nov 12 - Internally dividing up the ownership of specific aspects. Roles like âTickets/Attendees Managerâ, âSpeakers Managerâ, âSponsors & Design Managerâ, âMarketing & Social Media Managerâ, âVolunteers Managerâ
Nov 14 - First speaker announced (Vlad Dyachenko: âThe Perfect Programming Language for the AI Eraâ)
Nov 15 - Deadline of Call for Speakers
Nov 18 - Internal work on planning a speaker engagement timeline & other logistics
Nov 7-22 - All 50 Believer tickets sold out (Rs 3000)
Nov 25 - First talks with Plaza
Nov 28 - Plaza locked in as venue
Nov 24 - Dec 31 - Early Bird 3500
December: Momentum, Pressure, Decisions
Dec 6 - Someone tried (& failed at) compromising our ticket server
Dec 8 - Started adding speakers to the wwktm slack â2026-ai-conf-speakersâ
Dec 21 - Still not decided if lightning talks or panel
Dec 22 - Co-hosted Cafe Cursor Ktm
Dec 25 - Tech Kura Kani #30 - Year in Review and AI Conf AMA
Dec 27 - Hike candidates: Putali Dada, Chaap Dada
Dec 23 - Deadline for Early Bird tickets announced as Dec 31
Dec 24 - Meeting about printables, swags, etc
Dec 27 - Manish dai first scouting of hike location. In the evening, hike location tentatively finalized
Dec 28 - People asking about how to buy tickets from abroad. Instead of building a system for this edge case (for now?), decided to go the simpler route of just reserving their seats and accept cash on event day itself.
Dec 29 - Call for volunteers announced. Received a lot of love and attention; 100+ applications within a day, closed the form; choosing then was a nightmare7
For future reference for us and anyone else interested in organizing conferences, we had 7 volunteers: 1 lead/sponsorship, 1 hall runner, 1 time keeper, 1 social media, 3 registration desk.
Of course, during the day, stuff came up and volunteers had to go above and beyond their roles.
Thank you Ashutosh, Badal, Diwash, Raunak, Himani, Shisir and Rejina for all your help!
Dec 30 - Panel finalized!
Dec 31 - Final day for Early bird tickets
10:34 - Tickets are ticking up!
13:50 - Ticket count looking pretty close to 300!
16:00 - Emergency google meet call of organizing team, deciding what to do since we cannot handle many more people
17:00 - announced âWeâre sold outâ on all socials
Status: Tickets for the conf sold out even before starting selling Standard tickets (and yes, we were very surprised at this too8 )
Pre event week (ish)
Jan 1, 2026 - Things heating up. Below is a photo of a whiteboard where among other things, you can see a quickly penned diagram of the venue and our decisions about which pathways to open and which to close, as well as what to place where
Jan 2 & 3 - Community table for wwktm at Fintech Expo
Jan 3 - Manish dai second scouting of the hike location. Verifying/finalizing gathering points, etc.
Jan 4 - Limited conference-only passes released (after coordination with Plaza and with other stakeholders about how we could increase number of people without compromising on the experience)
Jan 5 - âWe are officially sold out! Our context window is full, and we simply cannot tokenize any more attendees.â
Jan 6 - Maybe the most busy day for our designers @Designer Duo. They managed to design multiple social media posts, the name wall, the attendee cards, some website components, and other misc things on the same day!
Jan 5 - 8 - Sakar dai spending all day onboarding our volunteers, clarifying all the roles
Jan 7: Reporting about AI Conf 2026 in The Kathmandu Post
Jan 8 - Vibe coded giveaway spinner app & held first pre-event giveaway
Jan 8 and 9 - AI Conf quarter page ad in KTM post, with all our sponsors and supporters, as well as photos of all the speakers
Jan 9 - Prep for the main day
Merch getting printed left right and center
Tote bags, all stuff to keep inside it arrived and were arranged/packed
of course, some new stuff arrived later and we had to repack đŹ
Ticketing system also got new vibe coded features - ability to scan QR and check people into the conference
Jan 9 - Speakers dinner
A cozy dinner before the event with all the speakers, organizers, and volunteers. Was very fun and also helped build comfort and rapport before the actual event day
Calm before the storm
Conference Day
Jan 10 - Conference day
On our feet the whole day so a bit hazy on all the things that happened (maybe you can let us know!)
Avinash dai gave the opening talk and Subash dai the closing talk.
Some vibe coding happened this day too:
Ability to rescan the ticket QR and sign up/confirm people for the hike that way
Realized we have a lot of things to give away and so giveaway spinner got a new feature to give away multiple items at once from a pool
Some things that ended up becoming hits
photo booth
name wall
Jan 11 - Hike day!
A relaxing, leisurely hike while getting to know people and make friends
Maybe the real AI Conf was the friends you made along the way đ¤Ł
An instagram reel we made of the day: here
A few asides we couldnât fit above
People who are interested in the logistics of a conference should find this section informative. If thatâs not you, feel free to skim below:
Aside: Sponsors
This first began with a sponsorship proposal: nailing down the different tiers, their amounts, and what we could offer them took a lot of work.
Then started the relentless and long-winded process of approaching and setting up meetings with companies about sponsoring the conference. Involved a lot of meetings, a lot of effort, and a lot of hearing âNoâs as well as a lot of non-responses.
One thing that sticks out in my mind as being a massive moral boost was CareBoarding reaching out to us for a sponsorship, and it feels like things started falling into place after that.
When approaching companies, we tried to do first contact via a personal connection, and when possible, asked multiple people with contacts in the company to recommend us. The reputation that wwktm had from our previous conferences helped a lot in this regard, but it still involved a lot of effort and constant check-ins (and rejections, did I mention rejections?)
All in all, sponsorships was one of the aspects that took up a majority of the organizing teamâs time and energy.
It paid off, because, at the end, we ended up having quite a number of sponsors and partners.
Massive thank you to all for making the conference possible!If youâre someone whoâd like to sponsor future editions of AI Conf, please contact us!
Aside: Venue (& tickets)
We fixed the venue after close consideration of a few options (we visited both our eventual venue and another candidate venue 3-3 times). Ended up going with the Plaza because our first thought when scouting the venue physically was âIt would be very cool to do our conf hereâ.
But that was not the end, far from it. Choosing stuff like the menu, the breakfast, all-day coffee was fun, but it was non-trivial to choose how many ballrooms and other spaces in the venue we needed. The main factor of the uncertainty was that we were not sure how many attendees we would have.
Uncertainty proved to be the correct intuition, we ended up over shooting our estimates and so had to later do extra work to add more space & tickets to the event
Really sorry to everyone we couldnât accommodate due to the tickets getting sold out :(
The lesson is that logistics planning is hard, especially when youâre not sure of the exact demand (duh?).
So, if youâre planning to attend a conference, then it really helps if you get your ticket as soon as you can! Helps the organizers a lot to make the experience awesome
(Other benefits of doing this: you get tickets at generally discounted rate, and you also reserve your seat in case tickets sell out sooner than expected)For fun, below is a graph of the ticket sales as they happened. Notable is how the slope changed completely a few days before Dec 31 (our deadline for early bird)
Aside: Speaker Selection
Call for speakers were opened on two platforms: our form and PaperCall
Speaker selection was done in stages:
First stage was just triage. We tried to rate talks privately (so as to not bias otherâs opinions) as they came in. Main benefits of this step were to weed out the spam submissions as well as the submissions that didnât match the vibe of the conference, as well as getting us acquainted with the submissions.
Later when we each had good enough understanding of the talks individually, each of us went about making our dream lineup. Some went about this by dividing the talks into categories and making sure each was represented well in the lineup, while some went through this by thinking through talks in sequence and thinking which fits the best after another (some images below, intentionally made blurry)
During the above process, as some speakers become âobviousâ, we sent acceptance letters with them and confirmed if they were still available to speak at our conference
Other misc speaker related stuff
Have a dedicated speaker channel in the Slack to communicate with them
Wrote a speaker guide with all necessary logistic info in one place: like contacts, details of all the days, and stuff like hotel info for international speakers
Ask speakers for slides as soon as possible and study them so that you can arrange the talks in the schedule for the conf day
Conclusion: After AI Conf 2026
Organizing AI Conf 2026 was intense, messy, exhausting, and deeply rewarding.
There were moments where things didnât go as planned. Moments where we werenât sure something would come together in time. And moments where the community surprised us in the best possible way by stepping up without hesitation.
What made it all worth it was seeing people connect. Watching conversations continue long after talks ended. Hearing from attendees who felt the conference gave them something they hadnât quite found elsewhere. And seeing people bond on hike day, not just as professionals, but as friends.
Weâre deeply thankful to everyone who helped make this happen. To the volunteers who gave their time, the speakers who trusted us with their work, the sponsors who supported a community-led vision, and the attendees who showed up with curiosity and openness. To the inimitable Ayush for emceeing the event and Pradeep for the music that is still stuck in our heads. There is literally no version of AI Conf 2026 that would exist without the collective effort of the community.
One thing is clear to us now: we want to keep building spaces like this. So yes, we do plan on doing an AI Conf again next year.
Before that, we want to listen. If you were part of AI Conf 2026, weâd really appreciate hearing what the experience was like for you: https://forms.gle/zxsNZ1zrcV1GxPsc7 .
We couldnât help ourselves from including a few testimonials weâve already gotten below (in this footnote9), but we really want to know all the ways we could improve too, so please help us out đ
Finally, a quick note about this Substack. Going forward, we plan to use it as a lightweight monthly update from WWKTM. Expect things like what weâve been learning or thinking about in AI, recommended reads and tools, highlights from community discussions, and a short writeup on the Tech Kura Kani (TKK) of the month.
If that sounds like something youâd enjoy, consider subscribing. We wonât email often, and weâll only share things we genuinely find interesting and worth passing along.
Thank you once again for trusting us as stewards of this community. Weâre proud of what we built together, and excited to keep going.
â Team WWKTM
Meta: These numbers are footnotes, feel free to skip them (tho they are fun so why would you?)
Actual footnote: In the ordered list of highs, post-conference glow is higher up than runnerâs high. To experience it, one weird trick (/doctors hate him): spend months of your life planning a conference that culminates in a day of everything where either it goes well or horribly wrong đ¤Ł
A bit tongue in cheek, yes, but I had to keep an em-dash here for fun. So TIL the hotkey for it (itâs opt-shift-hyphen btw)
And since human memory is super fallible, we expect we ourselves will come back to this writeup more than once in the future
Due to Slack 90 day limits, some of the info for the timeline had to be resurrected by Claude Code helping us with some git archaeology on the conf website git repo. Here is what the first prompt looked like:
and a glance at itâs output:
Another piece of context here is that we had planned and later cancelled a wwktm flagship conference in 2023. We did so because we did not feel the amount of energy we (the org team) had to invest in it then would be enough to provide the quality of event that our attendees deserve. So, when I say we were tentative about if we would do AI Conf, tentative is a bit of an understatement.
Tech Kura Kani (or TKK) is the name of our monthly meetups, which happen on the last Thursday of every English month. It is an informal meetup where we come together to talk all things tech, sometimes there is a talk, sometimes just a topic. If you want to attend the next, either follow us on socials or on our luma
If you were one of the people rejected, so sorry. We really did not expect that much of a response and in retrospect, shouldâve opened up and selected the volunteers sooner. We opened the form late, got a huge response, and in the hectic week up to the event, were not able to properly consider and respond to all that filled up the form.
I had asked Avinash dai if we were going to put a cap on the number of Early Bird tickets, and Avinash replied âIf we are sold out in Early Bird stage, then that is a good problem to haveâ. Well, it turns out that we did run into that âgood problem to haveâ XD
