Demos
Why the NLP Summit is now the Applied AI Summit
Five years ago, we launched the NLP Summit with a simple mission: create a home for practitioners working on natural language processing in the real world. At the time, the landscape was dominated by excellent academic conferences, but none that addressed the day-to-day challenges faced by data scientists, software engineers, and machine learning practitioners building production systems. We wanted to change that.
Our focus was always on applied NLP. We emphasized case studies, open source tools, deployment challenges, and practical lessons learned. And thanks to this focus, we built a strong, loyal community around real-world innovation in NLP. The past eight summits attracted a total of 25,000+ people, who learned from 350+ speakers from 250+ organizations like Google, Oracle, Mount Sinai, Stanford, Hugging Face, Databricks, Providence Health, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Optum, JP Morgan, Duke, Morgan Stanley, Roche, Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Merck, and many more. But AI has evolved, and so have we.
Since the summit began, the industry has exploded in both scope and impact. With the rise of generative AI, we’re no longer talking about just text or language understanding. We’re building multimodal systems—text, images, speech, code, video, and new modalities like genomics are still emerging. NLP is still a vital part of this ecosystem, but it’s now just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
So today, we’re excited to share the next chapter of our journey: The Applied AI Summit.
What’s Changing (and What’s Not)
The fundamentals of the summit remain the same: using AI for good. The free, virtual summit will remain so, and will continue to bring together the AI community for knowledge sharing from an industry-focused perspective designed to share what’s actually working in applied AI.
You’ll still see the same focus on:
- Case studies from real-world systems
- Open source tools and how to use them
- Metrics that matter
- Lessons from failure and success
But you’ll also see:
- Broader coverage beyond NLP—think generative AI and multimodal systems
- More sessions on responsible AI, governance, safety, and evaluation techniques
- A stronger emphasis on applied methods across industries, not just technologies
Introducing the Applied AI Summit Tracks
To reflect this broader scope, we’re expanding the structure of the summit into focused tracks that include:
- Applied Generative AI: From LLMs to agents, fine-tuning, grounding, measurement, feedback, and more—what works in production, what doesn’t, and how to scale effectively.
- Applied Healthcare AI: This will cover clinical decision support, precision medicine, drug development, patient journeys, real-world data, and other industry-specific applications.
- Applied AI Governance: Compliance, safety, ethics, red teaming, model monitoring, and the evolving regulatory landscape, including real risks and solutions.
Join Us in This Next Chapter
The AI world is moving fast—but we’re doubling down on what made the NLP Summit valuable in the first place: grounded, technical, no-fluff conversations among people who are building real-world solutions. So, whether you’ve joined us from the beginning or are new to the community, we welcome you to the Applied AI Summit.
Keep an eye out for our call for papers or register for the free, virtual event kicking off this September. We hope to “see” you there!
