On January 10 and 11, 2026, Kathmandu hosted what quickly became known as Nepal's biggest dedicated AI event — AI Conf 2026, held at The Plaza in Kathmandu and organized by the team behind Web Weekend Kathmandu (WWKTM). Billed as "AI in Action," the two-day conference marked the first major event in Nepal to focus squarely on applied AI — how it's designed, deployed, evaluated, secured, and governed inside real organizations — rather than treating AI as a purely theoretical or futuristic topic. With more than 400 participants and speakers joining from Nepal, the United States, Europe, and across Asia, the event signaled a shift in Nepal's tech community from simply following global AI trends to actively shaping and shipping AI products of its own.
What AI Conf Kathmandu Covers (Topics, Speakers)
AI Conf 2026 structured its first day around talks and a panel discussion, with a curated agenda spanning system design, security, and organizational questions around AI adoption — deliberately steering away from purely academic or hype-driven content. Confirmed speakers included Vlad Dyachenko from Madrid, a platform engineer and open-source contributor at Cybergizer, who explored what programming languages need to look like in an AI-assisted development world. Kathmandu-based engineer and educator Pranjal Timsina examined emerging AI security risks, including data leakage, training data poisoning, and the liabilities created when autonomous AI agents act on behalf of users. Haihao Liu, founder and CEO of Ternity Education and an AI researcher trained at MIT and Harvard, spoke on humanity-first AI safety and its long-term societal implications. Manu Chatterjee, joining from San Francisco, unpacked how modern AI systems convert unstructured inputs into concrete decisions and workflows.
Key Themes from This Year's Talks
Several themes ran consistently through the two-day program: AI agents and tool-use as the new frontier beyond simple chatbots, enterprise RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and LLM system architecture as core engineering concerns, and observability and MLOps as organizations move AI systems from prototype into production. Security emerged as a particularly prominent thread, reflecting growing awareness that AI systems introduce new attack surfaces — from data poisoning to agent-related liability risks. The event's headline panel, "Who Owns AI in the Company?", tackled a question many organizations are only now confronting: how responsibility for AI systems gets distributed across engineering, product, design, legal, and leadership as AI moves from side project to core business infrastructure.
Notable Local AI Builders and Startups Featured
While several international speakers headlined the event, AI Conf 2026 made a deliberate effort to place Nepali builders on the same stage as global practitioners. Kathmandu-based engineer Pranjal Timsina represented the local security and education space, while the event's sponsor list itself reads like a snapshot of Nepal's applied-AI ecosystem — including Fusemachines, one of Nepal's most prominent AI companies with global operations, alongside Leapfrog Technology, Programiz, Logpoint, SecurityPal AI, Gritfeat Solutions, Proshore, Care Boarding, and Kantipur NEO. This mix of homegrown AI companies and international speakers reflects the event's stated goal: promoting Nepal's growing technology ecosystem by placing local teams and companies on equal footing with internationally recognized names, rather than positioning Nepal purely as an audience for outside expertise.
Why Events Like This Matter for Nepal's AI Ecosystem
For many Nepali professionals, attending international AI conferences abroad is often prohibitively expensive and complicated by visa restrictions. AI Conf 2026 was explicitly organized to close that gap — bringing globally experienced builders and researchers directly to Kathmandu instead. This matters because it gives local engineers, designers, and founders direct access to the kind of applied, production-focused knowledge that's often hard to find in theoretical or academic settings, while also creating visibility for Nepal's own AI companies on an international stage. The event's second-day community hike in the Kathmandu Valley — a signature feature carried over from Web Weekend Kathmandu's earlier events — added an informal networking layer, letting attendees build the kind of cross-border relationships and collaborations that conference talks alone rarely produce.
How to Attend or Get Involved Next Year
AI Conf is organized annually by the Web Weekend Kathmandu (WWKTM) team, and based on this year's rollout, ticket announcements and speaker call-outs are typically shared through their official website and community channels well ahead of the event date. If you want to attend, speak, or sponsor next year's edition, the most reliable approach is to follow WWKTM's official conference site and community forum directly, since updates on dates, ticket sales, and the call for speakers are usually posted there first, along with any local meetups the team runs in the lead-up to the main event.
Frequently Asked Question
Is AI Conf Kathmandu only for engineers and technical AI professionals?
No — the event is designed for a broader mix of engineers, designers, product professionals, and founders who are actively building or deploying AI-powered products, not just AI researchers or data scientists. Talks on design leadership, organizational ownership of AI systems, and practical workflow tools sat alongside more technical sessions on system architecture and security, making the event relevant to product and design professionals as well as engineers.
AI Conf 2026 represented a genuine milestone for Nepal's tech scene — the first event of its scale to treat applied AI as a serious, organization-wide discipline rather than a buzzword. With strong local sponsor participation and a growing international speaker roster, it's a strong signal that Nepal's AI ecosystem is moving from watching global trends to actively contributing to them.
Discussion