AI Forum New Zealand and Tech New Zealand bring the Aotearoa AI Summit to Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre on 8-9 September 2026 — its first two-day edition and the first of three Wellington hostings locked in to 2030.
The Aotearoa AI Summit runs at Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre on 8-9 September 2026, and this edition marks two firsts: the Summit's first outing in the capital, and its first run as a two-day event. The organisers describe it on the Summit website as New Zealand's essential AI gathering, uniting industry leaders, researchers, policymakers and innovators around cutting-edge advances and real-world applications of AI. The 2026 theme is *Kia whakapuāwai | Agents of Change, Powered by Curiosity*. The AI Forum's own event listing puts the venue at 50 Cable Street, Te Aro, and gives the running window as 8:00am to 5:00pm across both days; the published programme opens registration at 8:30am on day one and closes the Summit at 4:15pm on day two.
The Summit is presented by AI Forum New Zealand together with Tech New Zealand, per the Summit website. The AI Forum describes itself as the body that brings together New Zealand's artificial intelligence community to harness AI technologies for a prosperous, inclusive and thriving future New Zealand, and it sits inside the wider Tech New Zealand alliance alongside NZTech. That parentage matters commercially: the AI Forum's listing confirms the Summit is run by the Tech Alliance, the same stable that produces the National Cybersecurity Summit, the Digitising Govt Conference and the Life Sciences Summit by BioTechNZ.
The Summit is the anchor of a small cluster of AI Forum properties. The Aotearoa AI Awards run in the same orbit — finalists are announced from the Summit stage on day two — and the Aotearoa AI Hackathon Festival feeds directly into the programme, with its top four teams pitching live on day one and the Summit audience voting for the overall winner. A 2025 edition preceded this one; the organisers publish a photo gallery and highlights package from it on the Summit site.
The programme is organised around five stated themes: AI infrastructure and sovereign capability; social licence, trust and public acceptance; workforce transformation and AI-augmented productivity; frontier technologies and what's next; and real-world adoption, design and implementation. The published speaker list skews toward enterprise, government and research rather than vendor demo. Martijn Verberg, Head of Engineering at Microsoft New Zealand, opens day one with a keynote on the frontier of AI and what it means for New Zealand. Peter-Lucas Jones of Te Hiku Media keynotes on the infrastructure and capability theme. Dr Stephen Rainbow, Human Rights Commissioner, and Dayle Takitimu, Indigenous Governance Partner at the Human Rights Commission, present a Human Rights Commission paper on AI; Dr Mahsa McCauley, Chair of the AI Forum and UNESCO NZ Commissioner, moderates the social licence panel. Day two features John-Daniel Trask, co-founder and CEO of Raygun and Autohive, on building an AI-enabled export economy, and David Steele of Plug and Play Tech Center in Texas on innovation ecosystems. Panellists are drawn from Datacom, ANZ Bank, DLA Piper, Spark, Deloitte, Stats NZ and academyEX.
Day two closes with three concurrent afternoon workshops — two senior-leadership sessions presented by Adobe and Zoho, and a hands-on AI-powered micro design sprint presented by academyEX — with delegates asked to nominate their choice ahead of the event. The audience the organisers are describing is decision-makers: executives, public-sector leaders, founders, investors and technical leads, rather than a pure developer crowd.
Tākina sits at 50 Cable Street in Te Aro, opposite Te Papa, and the organisers describe it as a purpose-built venue combining two plenary halls of conference space with a public gallery running touring exhibitions. Wellington City Council records the building opening at the end of May 2023: 18,000 square metres across three main levels, two flexible plenary spaces seating up to 700 and 1,600 people respectively for a combined 2,730 square metres, a further 2,770 square metres of exhibition and pre-function space across the two convention floors, a 1,280 square metre ground-floor exhibition gallery, five green rooms, full base isolation and 5-star Green Building certification.
The two convention floors can be hired separately or together, which is what makes a two-day multi-stream format with concurrent workshops workable in a single building. The Summit's own location page leans on Wellington's compactness — a walkable central city, daily flights from Australia and all New Zealand regions, and the country's densest concentration of eateries within a short walk of the venue. The organisers have arranged delegate accommodation with QT Wellington, Museum Apartments Wellington, TRYP by Wyndham Wellington, Oaks Wellington Hotel and West Plaza Hotel, all within the central-city cluster.
This is not a one-off booking. In December 2025 WellingtonNZ announced a partnership with Tech New Zealand securing three tech conferences for the capital: the FinTechNZ Hui and the Digital Trust Hui Taumata from 2026 to 2028, and the Aotearoa AI Summit in 2026, 2028 and 2030. Business Events Wellington manager Irette Ferreira framed the deal as a strategic match to the city's tech sector strategy, with Tech New Zealand's strategic programmes director Yvonne Gill describing conferences as key moments of confluence that build knowledge and forge partnerships.
For the sector, the interesting mechanic is the alternating-year pattern. Rather than competing for a single edition, Wellington has locked a rotating national conference into a predictable multi-year cycle, giving Tākina forward certainty in a September window that already carries Tech New Zealand volume — the same release notes the National Cybersecurity Summit at roughly 500 delegates and the Digitising Govt Conference at roughly 200 already running at the venue, with the BioTechNZ Life Sciences Summit at around 400 anchored there since 2023. A domestically produced conference that grows from one day to two, with a hackathon and an awards programme attached, is exactly the kind of repeat-cycle business that convention centres built for international rotation need between international wins.
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