Planning your September? We reviewed this year’s U.S. tech calendar and selected five events worth attending in 2026, covering fintech, enterprise software, AI infrastructure, climate technology and applied AI.
1.
9-11 September · New York Marriott Marquis · New York City
FinovateFall is built around one of the fintech sector’s most recognisable formats: seven-minute live product demonstrations with no slides or pre-recorded presentations. The 2026 event is expected to feature 68 companies demonstrating products across lending, underwriting, payments, identity verification, fraud prevention and other areas of financial services. More than a dozen of the participating companies are expected to demonstrate AI applications.
The conference also includes discussions on agentic AI, banking infrastructure, customer experience, payments, regulation and the economic environment.
A notable addition is IMPACT: Funders & Founders, a new one-day event running alongside FinovateFall on 11 September. Its programme includes curated investor meetings, founder pitches and conversations involving venture funds, corporate investors, accelerators and fintech operators. The format is designed specifically around companies seeking capital, commercial partnerships and introductions within financial services.
Banks and credit unions can also access dedicated pre-event programming on 8 September. The main conference begins with product demonstrations before moving into strategy sessions and the IMPACT programme on the final day.
2.
15-17 September · Santa Clara Convention Center · Santa Clara, California
AI Infra Summit focuses on the systems required to build, train and deploy AI at scale. Organisers expect more than 8,000 engineers, architects and executives, over 400 speakers and approximately 250 partners.
The programme spans compute, data movement, AI data centres, physical AI, data and models. Sessions examine issues such as inference economics, power availability, cooling, networking, storage, distributed training and the operational challenges of moving AI workloads into production.
Announced main-stage speakers include Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist and Technical Lead for Gemini at Google; Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel; Ian Buck, Vice President and General Manager of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA; Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President at Amazon; Sachin Katti, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Intel; and C. Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director of HCLTech.
The event is structured around specialised tracks rather than a single general AI programme. The Data & Models track alone is expected to include more than 60 speakers and over 11 hours of content, while the Data Movement programme focuses on production bottlenecks across memory, networking and storage.
In addition to the main stages, the expo provides access to infrastructure vendors, chip companies, cloud platforms, data-centre operators and emerging hardware businesses. This makes the event particularly relevant for teams comparing technical partners, evaluating architecture decisions or seeking commercial relationships across the infrastructure stack.
3.
15-17 September · Moscone Center · San Francisco and Salesforce+
Salesforce is positioning Dreamforce 2026 around the Agentic Enterprise and the use of AI agents across sales, marketing, customer service, data and internal operations.
The programme is expected to include more than 1,600 breakout sessions, over 50 product and visionary keynotes, more than 150 hands-on training sessions and demonstrations, and over 240 community roundtables. Programming is organised by product, industry and professional role, allowing participants to build agendas around specific customer segments or technical requirements.
Announced speakers include Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce; Anton Osika, Co-Founder and CEO of Lovable; Tony Robbins, entrepreneur and author; Sterling K. Brown, actor and producer; Renée Richardson Gosline, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan; Sheryl Lee Ralph, actor and advocate; and Keely Cat-Wells, Founder and CEO of Making Space. Salesforce continues to add speakers on a rolling basis.
The conference combines major product announcements with technical training, customer case studies, industry-specific sessions and meetings across the Salesforce partner ecosystem. Companies building integrations or selling enterprise technology can use the agenda to meet implementation partners, corporate buyers and teams responsible for Salesforce deployments.
Dreamforce has also historically included Dreampitch, a live competition for companies addressing major social or environmental challenges. In 2025, Salesforce awarded $200,000 to the winner and $100,000 to each of two runners-up. Salesforce had not yet published confirmed Dreampitch terms for 2026 as of 5 August, so companies considering the programme should monitor the official agenda rather than assume the previous structure will continue unchanged.
4.
20-27 September · Across New York City
Climate Week NYC is a distributed programme rather than a single-ticket conference. Organised by Climate Group alongside the United Nations General Assembly, the 2026 edition is expected to bring together more than 100,000 participants across over 1,000 events.
The week begins with an official Opening Ceremony, followed by The Hub Live, Climate Group’s curated programme of plenaries, roundtables and discussions. The wider calendar includes independently organised conferences, investor meetings, product showcases, policy sessions, workshops and private gatherings hosted across New York.
The programme covers energy, transport, industrial decarbonisation, the built environment, food systems, finance, nature, climate resilience and emerging technologies. Unlike a traditional conference, registration requirements differ by event: some sessions are public, while others require an invitation or separate application.
Examples already listed in the official 2026 calendar include a Climate Scaling Summit on moving clean-energy companies beyond pilot projects, a private Family Offices & Investors Summit involving institutional investors, venture funds and corporate venture teams, and SOSV’s HAX Deep Tech Showcase.
Because the programme is decentralised, the strongest opportunities often sit outside the largest headline sessions. Companies can build a targeted schedule around investors, prospective corporate customers, government programmes and sector-specific events, but many registrations open independently and may reach capacity well before the week begins.
5.
Day ZERO: 29 September · Main conference: 30 September-1 October · Pier 48 · San Francisco
The AI Conference brings together researchers, engineers, product leaders, investors and companies working on applied AI. Organisers expect more than 5,500 participants and over 120 speakers across the complete programme.
Sessions focus on how AI systems are designed, evaluated, deployed and scaled rather than only discussing broad industry trends. The programme covers research, infrastructure, AI engineering, product development, enterprise implementation and company building.
Announced speakers include Peter Norvig, Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford HAI; Chris Lattner, Co-Founder and CEO of Modular; Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR AI and co-author of Attention Is All You Need; Emmanuel Ameisen, Interpretability Researcher at Anthropic; Sergey Levine, Professor at UC Berkeley; and Jaclyn Konzelmann, Product Director at Google Labs.
The event includes an expanded Innovation Hub, where emerging companies can demonstrate AI tools and platforms, and the Startup Showdown, where eight early-stage companies deliver four-minute pitches in front of investors and the wider conference audience. Applications for the 2026 competition close on 14 August.
A separate Day ZERØ takes place on 29 September. Limited to approximately 350 participants, it offers smaller technical and leadership workshops alongside a live Hack Day. The winning Hack Day team advances to the Startup Showdown during the main conference.