🔥 March 17, 2026: 5:30PM to 7:30PM 🔥

Join the Chicago chapter of AI Tinkerers for our March gathering. This is a curated, technical room for active builders, engineers, and researchers to share working systems, dissect architecture, and trade hard-won lessons from the frontier of generative AI.

AI Tinkerers is a high-trust environment for honest technical work. We prioritize signal over noise, focusing on the “how” behind the build rather than the “why” of a product pitch. If you are actively shipping LLM-powered features, building novel agentic workflows, or wrestling with inference optimization, this is the room where you accelerate your roadmap.

Huge thanks to our friends at Programmers Inc. for partnering with us on our March meetup.

Programmers Inc. - Programmers Inc. is a software consulting company with 35 years of experience helping companies. They are primarily focused on AI with an emphasis on production viable use cases.

Live Demos: Architecture, Trade-offs, and What Broke

We are accepting proposals for short, technical show-and-tell demos. Skip the slides and product pitches; focus on the implementation details. Your five-minute demo should answer one core question: “How did you build this interesting thing?”

We want to see your messy experiments, creative hacks, and technical discoveries in action. Whether it is a novel context engineering setup, complex agentic orchestration, or hard-won lessons from deployment, the stage is for those actively building.

Submit Your Demo Proposal: https://chicago.aitinkerers.org/meetup/mu_o-ivrVuDrXQ/speaking

Schedule and Logistics

• Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
• Time: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
• Location: Chicago, IL (Specific venue details provided to accepted attendees only.)
• Capacity: 150 attendees

Curation Policy

AI Tinkerers is selective by design. Attendance is strictly screened to ensure the room is filled only with fellow engineers, founders, and researchers who are actively shipping AI. Space is highly limited and events consistently run with a waitlist.

Interested in supporting the local builder ecosystem? See sponsorship opportunities.

📊 AI Tinkerers Chicago Stats

• Attendees: This exclusive community of 2,189 subscribers comprises 52% AI/ML specialists and 68% full-stack engineers, with 32% holding founder or executive titles. Members represent elite institutions like UChicago, UIUC, and Google. Notable achievements include deploying production-grade agentic workflows, building open-source developer platforms, and engineering FDA-cleared medical AI, making this Chicago’s premier hub for high-signal technical collaboration.
• Companies Represented: Featuring tech giants and AI leaders like Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Waymo, alongside fast-growing platforms such as DoorDash, Robinhood, TikTok, and Pinecone, and emerging startups like ElevenLabs, HumanLayer, Autonoma AI, and pieces.app, and more
• Demos: 184 demos have been submitted and 107 have been presented. The most exciting themes have centered on agentic workflows, retrieval and knowledge-centric systems, and production-grade reliability via evals, observability, and guardrails. Technical exploration has also highlighted structured generation (function calling and schemas), efficiency/cost optimization for LLM pipelines, and practical multimodal/document processing.
• Testimonials:

  “Please continue organizing interactive AI events with industry professionals and real-world discussions about technology trends, career opportunities, and practical AI applications. ... Events like this are very helpful for students and professionals looking to grow their technical skills and better understand the future of AI and technology.”

  — QA engineer, cloud support

  “For the people that don't get to present, what if their work could be featured in some way that allows others to see a demo online or read a deck describing the work (or both)... This is such a great idea. I signed up right away. ... Your network puts you in a unique position to really make this idea scale...”

  — Founder, crypto AI

  “Such a cool concept”

  — Devrel @ web3 foundation

  “Leaders from successful startups as speakers is great. Love hearing from my tinkerers but it was clear alpha in building a business and companies actually hiring created a different vibe.”

  — Founder, GTM strategy

  “Keep up the good work. This group is a really great way to stay connected to what's happening with AI in Chicago.”

  — Founder, crypto AI

  “Please keep organizing highly technical, builder-focused AI events like this in Chicago.”

  — R&D engineer, defense tech

  “I enjoyed the breakout room like discussions from the previous Meetup hosted by Zapier. Those allowed us to easily connect and talk about experiences.”

  — Applied AI engineer