AI Council: Our Evolution
A name-change isn't a pivot when it's been coming all along
In 2019 I wrote a post called Why We Became Data Council. It marked a moment in time for our conference series, a shift away from “Big Data” buzzwords toward a community built by and for the people doing real technical work. It was the right name for that era.
A lot has happened since. The AI revolution our “data” community had been building toward finally arrived. We’ve seen dozens of AI startups — Modal, Pinecone, Lightning AI, RunLLM, LMArena and many more — launched by Data Council speakers. And we’ve watched deeply technical founders from across our community grow into their own next act, embracing and shaping the AI wave.
Now, five years later, it’s time to evolve our name to reflect what we’ve already become.
Why? Because over the years Data Council has grown into something bigger — AI Council is simply the best expression of what our community is actually building.
Data is the Mother of AI
Our new name acknowledges a simple truth: we sit at the intersection of data technology and intelligence systems.
Data and AI are now inseparable.
How models are trained = data.
How they improve = better data.
How they integrate into your enterprise = internal data.
All curation, fine-tuning, pre- and post-training work, and enterprise integrations ultimately rely on access to high-quality data. And generally, the more of it you have, the better your AI systems perform.
And even for AI app builders, defensibility ultimately comes from data. As your product scales, you generate proprietary signals about how users interact with it and that data becomes your true moat. It’s what transforms an easily copied wrapper into a durable, defensible AI application.
My strong belief is that you cannot build a high-scale AI company without facing real data management and infrastructure challenges. Retrieval quality, evaluation rigor, lineage, multimodal data storage, inference economics, agent reliability — these are the problems of the AI systems of the future, and they are the problems engineers in our community have had a significant head start in solving.
What Hasn’t Changed (and Never Will)
In spite of this evolution, our core values remain intact:
A no-bullshit builder culture.
We are still a home for deeply technical founders, engineers, OSS maintainers, data & AI practitioners, and the people building the tools that move the industry forward. Signal over noise. Craft over hype. The smartest engineers we know build tools for other engineers.
IRL is our medium.
We’ve always believed in the hallway track, the lo-fi social graph, the handshake that leads to a side project that becomes a company. In a world increasingly mediated by models, in-person connection is more valuable than ever. We remain staunch in this belief (which is why we still have no livestream at our events).
Thoughtful community integration — not silos.
This has always been our superpower. Engineers, founders, researchers, operators, vendors and VCs all in the same room together as peers. We blur lines that are rigid everywhere else, and the result is the thing that makes this community magic: the high-quality collisions that lead to new ideas, tools, and companies.
That’s why the future of AI shows up early in our hallways. It’s why founders prototype ideas during our lunch break. It’s why the best teams in the world quietly send their entire engineering org to our event. It’s why VCs come to find the companies building the future — while they’re still in stealth.
These values were the fabric of Data Council — and they remain the backbone of AI Council.
What’s Next
AI Council will continue to be the home for builders of intelligent, data-driven systems, and we’re making several updates to support that mission.
First, we’ve launched an all-new track lineup that embraces the full scope of modern AI while maintaining space for the critical data infrastructure that underpins it. This reflects the reality of our community: AI engineering and data engineering are now one continuous discipline.
Second, our content will remain vendor-balanced. No single company dominates. Further, we curate a mix of open-source and proprietary technologies to ensure the program stays technically rigorous and is fully representative of the broader ecosystem.
Third, we’re expanding globally. Our focus is on growing a distributed community of builders across the US, UK, EU and Israel, regions where some of the most interesting AI and infra builders are emerging. Returning to Europe is an important part of this effort.
Finally, we’re creating more structured ways for engineer-founders to get support from Zero Prime Ventures. Many of the best new companies in our orbit come directly from this community, and we want to make it even easier for early builders to get company building guidance, inception stage capital, and a trusted first partner.
Through all of this, we’ll continue to prioritize the same transparent, high-signal environment that has always defined our events.
An Invitation
If you’re a builder — an engineer, founder, researcher, OSS maintainer or someone who simply cares about technical excellence — you’re already part of this community.
If you want to understand where AI is headed next, come build with us.
Welcome to AI Council.
Exciting news! Looking forward to this next chapter
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