All Things AI Is Moving to Raleigh

All Things AI 2027 moves to the Raleigh Convention Center April 18–20, followed by an invite-only Executive AI Summit on April 21. Plus the day of AI training we're bringing to All Things Open next week.

We filled the room in Durham. The keynote ballroom was packed, the workshops sold out, and the hallway between sessions turned into the best part of the conference. That's a good problem, and it has one fix: a bigger building.

So here's the news. All Things AI 2027 is moving to Raleigh. We'll be at the Raleigh Convention Center, now called the Atlantic Union Bank Convention Center, from Sunday, April 18 through Tuesday, April 20, 2027. It's the same building where All Things Open happens next week, so if you're coming to that, you can scout the halls.

There's more in this edition. We're bringing a full day of hands-on AI training to All Things Open on Monday, our next Lunch and Learn is Tuesday at noon, and there's a new section near the bottom called AI Dogfooding, where we show you how All Things AI itself runs on AI. First up: the conference software we wrote ourselves.

If you do one thing with this email, save the date for All Things AI 2027 so you hear about tickets first.

All Things AI started in Durham, and Durham was good to us. But the conference outgrew the building, and the community did too. Raleigh gives us room for every session we want to run, more hands-on workshop seats, and a downtown that can feed a few thousand people at lunch.

Here's what the week looks like:

What doesn't change is who it's for. All Things AI is still the conference for people putting AI to work in business, government, and education, from the CFO to the career-changer. And we're keeping seats open for people who can't buy a ticket: in 2026, 807 people came on a free seat, and for 2027 we've committed to at least 500 scholarship and access seats.

Tickets and the call for speakers are coming soon. The fastest way to hear first is to save the date.

🎫 Save the date for All Things AI 2027 →

All Things AI is bringing a full day of hands-on AI training to All Things Open, the Southeast's biggest open source conference. It runs Monday, October 19 and Tuesday, October 20 at the Raleigh Convention Center, the same building All Things AI moves into next April, with more than 50 AI workshops and sessions on the schedule.

Our training day is Monday. Three all-day AI workshops run from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, taught by people from the All Things AI stage, and each one includes Tuesday's conference day.

AI Agents & Vibe Coding — with Mark Hinkle

You build and deploy a real application with AI agents, and leave with the working app and a GitHub repository that records every change the agents made. No coding experience needed.

AI Agents in Production — with Don Shin of CrossComm

Agent fundamentals, the production patterns that hold up, and how to connect agents to your tools and data with the Model Context Protocol.

AI for DevSecOps — with John Willis of AI CIO

Where AI strengthens security across the delivery pipeline, and how to put controls on AI-assisted work. For people who already know CI/CD.

Workshops are $399, and most employers cover them as professional development.

Todd Lewis and the All Things Open team set aside a final batch of free passes for All Things AI readers. There are two kinds, and they're limited:

Want both days? Grab both passes. Once the free passes are gone, this link takes 20% off any paid ticket, workshops included. Click your link, hit the orange "Get Tickets" button, and pick your ticket; the code is already applied.

Please claim a pass only if you can come. Passes are limited, and lunches nobody eats get thrown away.

Monday's co-located events are free, too; add them separately in Eventbrite: an AI hackathon from Major League Hacking for every skill level, the Community Leadership Summit, Inclusion & Diversity in Open Source, and the Open Source Accessibility Summit. Students and people underrepresented in tech can still apply for scholarships.

And if you want to warm up, NVIDIA and Red Hat are hosting the free NVIDIA x Red Hat Small Models Hack, which runs Saturday, October 17 and Sunday, October 18 in Raleigh. It's capped at 100 people and requires approval, so apply today.

🎫 Claim a free Tuesday pass →

Coming with our crew? RSVP for AI Training Day on the All Things AI (Live) Meetup so we can find each other in the hallway.

Tuesday, October 20 | 12:00 PM ET | Online, one hour

AI writes more of the code every month. That doesn't make engineers less important. It moves the hard part. Knowing how a system behaves under load, how it fails, and how it changes over time is now the skill that separates people who prompt from people who ship.

Byron Mackay is Director of Learning at Gauntlet AI, where he trains hundreds of engineers to work AI-first. Before that he spent 16 years as a mobile engineer, built evaluation platforms as an AI platform engineer, and led curriculum at BloomTech. He'll talk about why system design matters more now that AI writes the code, how to guard the decisions you can't undo, and how to learn it using Claude as a tutor.

It's built for software engineers with some production experience, and it's useful for anyone earlier in their career too. It runs over lunch on the same Tuesday as All Things Open, so you can catch it from the hallway.

🎫 RSVP free on All Things AI (Live) →

Part 1: We built our own conference system.

Every week we tell you how to put AI to work. Here's how we do it ourselves, starting with the biggest bet we've made: the software that runs All Things AI.

For our first conferences, we stitched everything together from rented tools. One for tickets, one for the call for speakers, a spreadsheet for sponsors, and a lot of copying between them. None of it fit the way we actually run registration, speakers, sponsors, and the community around them. And we were paying for every ticket we sold.

So we built our own. It's called ConferenceOS. It runs events.allthingsai.org: registration, attendees, the speaker call for proposals, sessions, sponsors, and the CRM behind all of it. We're releasing it as open source under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), so anyone can use it, and anyone who runs a changed version as a service has to share those changes back. Right now we're cleaning up the code so we can release it on GitHub.

Mark chose that license on purpose. We believe in sharing and giving back, and the AGPL says so in writing: if you build on our work, the community gets your improvements too. We think that's a good way to build software. And if it turns out to be the wrong fit, we can change the license later.

Most of the code was written by AI. We run a small team of coding agents (Claude, Codex, and Grok), and Mark sets the product direction and decides what ships. One rule holds it together: whoever wrote the code doesn't review it. A different model checks every change before it merges.

Not everything went smoothly. For days our tests went green on a version that couldn't deploy. The checks passed and the product didn't ship. Now "it deploys" is a check of its own, and it runs first.

If you're building with AI, have a different model review the code than the one that wrote it. It catches the mistakes a model can't see in its own work.

We wrote up the other places we use AI, from this website to our video edits and ads, on our How We Dogfood AI page.

🎫 See ConferenceOS →

The Triangle's other AI groups have a strong couple of weeks, too. Two worth your time:

Wednesday, October 21 — Impact of AI & Automation in the Ag Value Chain

RTP AgBio + AgTech, 5:00 PM. Where AI and automation are showing up between the farm and the grocery shelf, in one of North Carolina's biggest industries.

Wednesday, October 28 — The AI Playbook for Business Analysts

The RTP Raleigh chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis, online at 6:30 PM. A practical look at where AI fits in a business analyst's work.

Know a local AI event we missed? Hit reply and tell us. We'll put it in the next edition.

If you're newer here, All Things AI is part of The AIE Network. Its flagship, The AI Enterprise, sends four free editions a week. OpenAI's DevDay dominated the last two weeks, so start there.

📬 Subscribe free and get The AI Enterprise in your inbox →

AI is moving fast. We're here to make sure no one gets left behind. Thank you for being part of a community that learns together and builds responsibly.

Best Regards,

Mark & Todd