AI and Games Conference 宣布 2027 年蒙特利尔站扩展计划

Hey everyone. This issue of the newsletter is going live within minutes of the AI and Games Conference 2026 coming to a close. I’ll have a more thorough post-mortem of sorts next week, but for now I wanted to get this out there to share some initial thoughts on a bunch of things. Notably, that we just closed the event by announcing our next one. In 2027 we’re expanding into North America with AI and Games Conference Montreal running June 22nd and 23rd in at Centre Mont-Royal.

This has been almost a year in the making, and I wanted to talk a little bit about what we have planned, and how this has all come to pass.

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Sheridans Games Masterclass

A quick message to say thank you to Anna Poulter-Jones and the team at law firm Sheridans for inviting me to be on a panel at the 2026 Games Masterclass in London last week. Great to catch-up with a number of folks in and around the UK sector. A big thanks also to my fellow panellists Henry Adams, the director of trust and safety at Resolver, and Daniele Schmidt-Fischer who is the senior policy and public affairs manager at Ukie. We could have continued on for another 30 minutes easily.

2026 Conference is a Wrap!

Good grief, how have we managed to do this three years in a row? A huge thank you to everyone who has joined us these past 2-3 days in Olympic Park for what has been - from my perspective at least - another highly successful event. We sold out the event, people looked happy, the sessions were packed, and the new workshops were very popular!

It is and continues to be an honour to be able to bring our community together. I won’t lie one of the biggest moments of personal satisfaction for myself is seeing so many talent and influential people I’ve known these past 20 years come together. Many of these people I’ve looked up to and admired for the contributions they have brought to our community. But also it’s exciting to provide a space where new and upcoming voices can enter the space and be welcomed as peers.

I dunno man, I think we just like bringing people together. Getting everyone into the same space is just a damn good feeling, and we’ll be riding high off that buzz for another couple of days at least.

Once again a huge thank you to all of our attendees, speakers, sponsors, and organisational staff for making this event what it is. I’ll have some more coherent thoughts around the programme and the conversations had throughout next week.

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Announcing the AI and Games Conference Montreal 2027

As we closed out day two of this years AI and Games Conference within the last hour, it was time to announce a little something we’ve been cooking up for the better part of this year. Our conference is launching a North American expansion in 2027 with the AI and Games Conference Montreal.

Some of you may recall I was out in Montreal in July of this year right after Develop. At the time I kept tight-lipped about what was happening but in truth it was a critical step in what has been an ongoing process since the start of this year. Myself, Sally Kevan, and Duygu Cakmak went out to Montreal because we’d done the due diligence: we’d identified candidate venues, and we needed to go see it for ourselves. So I was out there not just to scope out our new home away from home, but also to meet with local studios, trade representatives, and universities about what we had planned. Not just to take what we have proven to be a success in London and bring it to Montreal, but also to look at how this new venture should reflect the talent, innovation, and expertise of this new territory.

The Key Information

So first things first, the key information:

• What: AI and Games Conference Montreal 2027

• Where: Centre Mont-Royal

• When: June 22nd / 23rd

Early bird tickets and speaker submissions are live now, with the deadline closing on February 28th 2027. All the information and links to submissions and tickets can be found on the conference website.

Montreal 2027 Website

Supporting the North American Community

Today is the beginning of what I have dubbed as phase 3 of our plans for the AI and Games Conference. Delivering on our very first event was the conclusion of our first phase: of figuring out how to do this, of delivering an event that we would want to attend, and one that our colleagues and peers would want to turn up to as well.

During our 2024 post-mortem we wrote down a whole list of ideas of what we wanted to do next. While I won’t divulge what was written down - after all, we’re still working on some of them - the last entry at the bottom of that list read: ‘Conference #2: North America’.

Even from year 1, we saw the potential to try and run a second conference. Despite putting our 2024 event together in a relatively short period of time and with limited resources, this didn’t stop delegates travelling from North America to join us in London. When players from some of the biggest studios in the US and Canada are taking the trip to be a part of what we’re doing it - and coming back a year later - it became clear to us that our ambition to provide hype-free and meaningful discourse on Game AI was connecting far beyond our original ambition of a European event.

So March of 2025 began what I dubbed phase 2: figuring out how to turn what was still a scrappy outfit with a lot of gumption into a business that could scale, that could grow, but retain the quality and community that we established in year one. As anyone who has ran events will tell you, this is an expensive line of work, and one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is figuring out how to grow. We’re still a very young event without collateral or a financial backer, so we focussed on the two things we felt we had got right from day 1: the editorial, and the community spirit. Using that as the lynchpin as we built a stronger financial footing that would allow us to expand into new ventures.

And so by getting to the stage on Tuesday morning - and many a late night staring at our financials and budget spreadsheets - I felt confident that phase 2 has come to an end. It’s time to take a big swing, and hope that everyone is on board as we expand into running two events on two continents in 2027.

New Conference, New Advisors

From the very beginning we understood the need for us to build up our editorial board to support this new venture. Not just because we’re now going to be doubling the amount of talks we review in a given year - and this year between London and Gamescom Dev we looked at over 150 submissions - but also that we wanted this new conference to tap into the communities in this new territory. Our London event has benefitted immensely from our contacts in and around the UK and European game development scene, and as such the Montreal event deserved the same treatment - and besides we couldn’t just lump it all on poor Gabriel.

So with a new event comes new advisory board members, and it’s my pleasure to welcome three new collaborators to the AI and Games Conference team.

Alexandre Audette Génier is a Technical Architect at Ubisoft Montreal, currently working on March of Giants. He brings over a decade of experience spanning gameplay programming, AI systems, and technical leadership across two major studios: Ubisoft Montreal and Amazon Games. Alexandre has an applied research background in reinforcement learning for games, with a particular focus on player bots – work that bridges cutting-edge AI research with practical, production-ready game systems.

Andrea Schiel has over 25 years of experience in game AI development, and has shipped a wide range of titles across multiple genres and platforms for EA, Microsoft and now Ubisoft. Currently an AI Technical Lead at Ubisoft Toronto, Andrea specializes in AI architecture, planning systems, and coordinated multi-agent behaviours, with a focus on creating robust, scalable systems for complex game worlds.

Dr Matthew Guzdial is an Associate Professor in the Computing Science department of the University of Alberta and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and creativity in the domain of video games, including in collaboration with game studios like Inflexion and Hyper Hippo. He was the 2025 Science Fellow for the Edmonton Space Science Foundation (ESSF) and has early career recognitions from IJCAI and NSERC.

Alex, Andrea, and Matthew are our eyes and ears in Canada: liaising with local practitioners, and helping us ensure that the event reflects the very best coming out the North American community.

Same Format, New City

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. While we’re also working to iron out the kinks in what we do, it’s clear that we get the fundamentals right: great speakers, great partners, great content. The AI and Games Conference is where people come to meet with likeminded developers, and to hear not just from the leading voices in our sector, but also new and emerging talent who have unique perspectives that deserve to be heard.

AI and Games Conference Montreal will continue that tradition, with a format familiar to this who have attended in London the past couple of years. That said, a new location breeds new opportunity, and I’m pleased to say we’re benefitting from the support of McGill University who have supported us since the very beginning.

We’re still in active conversations with McGill about what additional opportunities they can bring to the event, but we have some early ideas we’re throwing around internally, and we look forward to sharing more info on this in the new year.

What About London?

Don’t worry, for those of you on my side of the Atlantic, the only thing changing right now is the name: with our November event officially being rebranded next year to the AI and Games Conference London 2027. Given that this event concluded all of about 45 minutes ago, it’s a little too early to discuss what we have planned, but critically we hope to maintain and build on the position we set out for ourselves this year at Here East - with the workshops in particular indicative of how we hope to deepen the London event in the future. Like I say, far too early to talk about it in any serious capacity, but we’ll be getting to work on this very soon.

Wrapping Up

If you’re reading this right as it has published, then we might have finished the teardown and are headed to the pub, or perhaps for dinner. But yes, we’re glad to have successfully executed on our event, and we’re grateful to everyone for their continued enthusiasm and support of the AI and Games Conference.

It’s only now setting in that the next one is a mere 223 days away.

But for now, sleep: lots and lots of sleep.

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