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Conference playbook · past edition

HumanX 2026, San Francisco without a booth

This edition has wrapped. The playbook below still works for the next edition, or any conference you are attending. HumanX is the first AI conference built explicitly for buyers, not researchers. Curated CIO, Chief AI Officer, and Head of AI speakers, no academic-poster filler, and a vetted-attendee model that keeps the founder-to-buyer ratio sane. Two years in, it's already on the calendar of every Fortune 500 AI lead.

Dates
April 6–9, 2026
Venue
Moscone Center, San Francisco
Format
ai vertical
Official site
humanx.co/us

The four-week play

  1. T-28 days
    Pull the public speaker agenda
    The only window that matters. The 8-45-90 curve says 60-70% of all event-driven conversion comes from outreach started in this three-week window.
  2. T-25 days
    Enrich and score against your ICP
    Keep only the speakers who match. The rest go into a low-priority nurture for next year.
  3. T-21 days
    First touch, talk-specific
    Every M1 references the speaker's actual talk title or a specific line from a recent post, never the product, never the booth. Ask for a 15-minute coffee at the venue, not a demo.
  4. T-14 days
    Track reply rate
    Healthy is 8-15% on a talk-specific opener. The second touch to non-responders reframes around a peer attending the same panel.
  5. T-7 days
    Confirm logistics
    Calendar holds with venue and a specific landmark for everyone who said yes.
  6. On site
    Walk in booked
    The calendar is already full. Outreach misses turn into LinkedIn follow-ups during the event itself.

What's different about HumanX

  1. 01
    HumanX speakers are vetted as business AI decision-makers, not researchers. The list skews CIO, Chief AI Officer, Head of AI, and senior founder. That's the strongest possible buyer signal for AI-adjacent tooling.
  2. 02
    Moscone is the same venue as Snowflake and Databricks Summits, same walking radius, same coffee stands. Reuse the venue knowledge if you've played those before.
  3. 03
    HumanX is newer (started 2025) so the agenda updates more aggressively. Re-pull the speaker list weekly and add new names to your sequence, they haven't been blasted yet.
  4. 04
    Pair every M1 with a reference to the speaker's company's AI announcement. Every HumanX speaker is at a company that just shipped or is about to ship something AI-shaped. That's your hook.

The thing nobody will tell you

HumanX has already announced a 2027 Las Vegas edition before the 2026 SF edition has even happened, which means the organizer is privately confident this becomes the AI category's Money20/20. The speakers who say yes to 2026 are signalling they expect to be on the 2027 stage too. Playing 2026 well isn't a single-event bet, it's compounding into a calendar slot that will be ten times harder to land in 18 months.

FAQ

When and where is HumanX 2026?

April 6–9, 2026, at Moscone Center, San Francisco. It's a premier conference focused on real-world AI impact on business, leadership, and society.

Who attends HumanX?

Executives, founders, technologists, investors, and policymakers, explicitly decision-makers rather than practitioners. The speaker list is vetted as senior business AI leadership, which makes it the highest buyer-signal density of any AI conference.

How do you network at HumanX without a sponsorship?

Pull the speaker list weekly starting T-28, HumanX updates aggressively because it's a newer event. Send talk-specific LinkedIn DMs asking for 15 minutes at a coffee stand near Moscone. The vetted-decision-maker audience makes reply rates higher than at general tech conferences.

Run this play on HumanX

Sayintel automates the four-week playbook end to end: speaker extraction, enrichment, ICP scoring, and per-speaker draft generation that quotes the actual talk. You approve every send, nothing goes out without your tap.