amsterdam

with Marion Ranchet (Host, Streaming Made Easy)

A full-day media-technology conference at the Rode Hoed, timed to land immediately before IBC opens. The premise is blunt: five years of firefighting have made the streaming industry excellent at reacting and worse at building, and SME Live is positioned as the room for the conversations too big for a forty-five-minute panel. Aimed at content owners, telcos, streamers and technology vendors, with tiered pricing by attendee type. Useful for anyone in video infrastructure, media SaaS or adjacent commercial roles who wants substance before the IBC scrum begins.

The AI Salon format — short provocations then structured small-group discussion rather than a panel and a queue for the microphone — hosted this month in Booking.com's Oosterdok building. Draws a mix of researchers, applied ML engineers and founders, and the discussion quality is consistently above what the free ticket suggests.

The KIN Center for Digital Innovation at VU Amsterdam runs its research-meets-practice talk series, this edition on AI systems that keep learning after deployment. Academic hosting keeps the vendor content out; the audience is a useful mix of VU researchers and people from Amsterdam product teams.

IBC is the largest gathering in Europe for the media, entertainment and broadcast technology industry, filling all of RAI Amsterdam for four days. The 2026 programme runs heavily on streaming architecture, cloud production, AI in content workflows and the economics of distribution — and the exhibition floor is where most of the European media-tech supply chain does business. A genuine anchor week for Amsterdam: a dense fringe of meetups and drinks orbits it, several of which are listed separately here.

A morning session at AI House on the Zuidas about what changes when AI stops being a tool and starts behaving like a colleague. For decades enterprise software was built for people; the argument here is that platforms are now being designed for humans and AI agents together — digital coworkers that reason, collaborate and execute work end to end. Aimed at people responsible for how AI actually gets adopted inside an organisation rather than at the engineers building the models. Free.

A relaxed after-work gathering for Amsterdam's international tech community, hosted at Capital C on the Bloemenmarkt. Bring your drink, swap stories and expand your network during IBC week. Open to founders, engineers, marketers, designers and anyone working in tech — no ticket required.

The Dutch ClickHouse user group at Adyen, whose own analytics stack makes the host a credible source of war stories. Real-time analytics at volume, schema design and the operational side of running ClickHouse in production — a technical evening with an audience of data engineers.

Pakhuis de Zwijger and Amsterdam AI put generative tooling in front of the people whose work it displaces and the people building it, in the format Pakhuis does best — an argument on stage rather than a product demo. Strong choice if you work anywhere near design, media or creative production in the city.

A builder-first AI meetup at StartDock on the Keizersgracht — demos and short technical talks from people shipping AI features, with graph and retrieval infrastructure a recurring theme. Practical rather than strategic, and small enough that you can actually talk to the presenters.

React Amsterdam is the largest front-end community in the city and this edition takes on AI-assisted web engineering — what actually changes in a React codebase when agents write part of it. Front-end engineers, and one of the better rooms in Amsterdam for finding a job by talking to people.

Amsterdam's database meetup, hosted at Adyen. AMS DB stays deliberately vendor-neutral and runs across Postgres, distributed stores and the query-engine layer, which makes it a better read on what Dutch engineering teams actually run than any single-product user group.

A working session at Startup Village on the Dutch and EU grant landscape for deeptech — WBSO, MIT, EIC and the rest — run with Sira Incentives. Non-dilutive funding is the least glamorous and most useful topic for a hardware or deeptech founder in the Netherlands, and this is a practitioner walking through it rather than a pitch.

Ladies that UX Amsterdam's monthly evening, this edition on where human judgement still beats the dashboard in design decisions. Hosted at Van Lanschot Kempen. A reliably well-run design community with a broad audience — researchers, product designers and content people.

A two-day technology expo at the Johan Cruijff ArenA covering internet, mobile, adtech, martech and SaaS, with the DigiMarCon digital marketing conference co-located alongside it. Visitor passes start at EUR 27 early-bird and a limited number of free passes are released to local residents. Useful for marketers and commercial teams at SaaS businesses more than for engineers.

The Linux Foundation's European summit for the Model Context Protocol — the interface layer most agent tooling is now standardising on. Two days of keynotes and technical sessions for the people actually building MCP servers, clients and agent infrastructure, co-located with AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe. If you write agent code, this is the developer conference of the month.

A hands-on afternoon on attacking and hardening LLM applications — prompt injection, tool-use abuse, data exfiltration through agents — hosted at Nebius. Security work on AI applications is badly under-served in the Amsterdam meetup calendar, which makes this worth the half-day.

HumanX brings its US AI conference format to Europe for the first time, landing at RAI Amsterdam for three days with 2,500+ senior practitioners and 200+ media. The team behind it built Money20/20, Shoptalk and HLTH, and the programming reflects that: enterprise AI adoption, procurement, governance and deployment rather than research talks. Worth the ticket if your job involves getting AI into production inside a large organisation.

Accel runs an AI-focused morning at Prosus AI House on the Zuidas. VC-hosted programming of this kind is usually worth attending for the room as much as the stage — European AI founders, Accel's own portfolio operators and the investors who track them, in a building that has become the default AI venue in the city.

The Blender Foundation's annual conference, run from its home city, covering the open-source 3D pipeline end to end — modelling, geometry nodes, rendering, pipeline engineering and the studios shipping production work on it. Three days of talks from core developers and working artists. A rare case of a genuinely global open-source project holding its flagship event in Amsterdam.

An open, relaxed evening at Mollie's Keizersgracht office for builders working on their own ideas alongside a job or studies. This edition takes distribution as its loose theme — how, why and when to actually ship your product, which is usually the part that kills side projects rather than the building. No pressure and no expectations: bring an idea and a few hours. Hosting at Mollie puts one of the Netherlands' biggest fintech success stories in the room.

Data Thursday runs monthly out of B. Amsterdam's B3 building and is one of the steadier data-engineering communities in the city. Two talks, food, and a room of people who run pipelines for a living rather than talk about them.

with Ashwin Sreenivas (Co-founder, Helia / formerly Palantir)

A small fireside with Ashwin Sreenivas, whose route from Palantir into founding and selling an AI company gives him an unusually concrete view of enterprise AI deployment. Named-speaker events at this scale on the Keizersgracht fill quickly — register early.

Amsterdam.rb at Catawiki, one of the larger Rails shops in the city. A long-running group that has outlasted several Ruby news cycles — talks skew to production experience rather than framework tourism, and the host's own scale makes for good questions.

Rust Amsterdam meets at the BlockTech campus on NDSM. Systems-level talks with a crypto-infrastructure lean given the venue, but the group has kept its scope broader than that — expect performance, memory-model and tooling content aimed at working engineers.

Code for NL runs an unconference at Marineterrein on digital autonomy — public-sector cloud dependence, open-source alternatives and what sovereignty actually costs to implement. Participant-set agenda, so the value scales with who turns up; the Dutch civic-tech and public-digital community reliably does.

A one-day conference at Hotel Casa on platform engineering across hybrid and multi-cloud estates — internal developer platforms, the Kubernetes layer under them, and the operating model that makes them stick. Aimed at platform teams and the architects who fund them.

CTO Craft brings its engineering-leadership conference to Amsterdam for two days — scaling teams, technical strategy, hiring and the parts of the CTO job that are not code. The community behind it is one of the better-run peer networks for engineering leaders in Europe, and the talks reflect people who have actually done the job.

The Dutch Postgres user group's autumn meetup, hosted at ABN AMRO on the Zuidas. Deep operational content — query planning, replication, upgrades — from people running Postgres at bank scale.

AI Native Amsterdam looks at how engineering organisations actually climb from AI autocomplete to agentic workflows, plus a technical walk through the MCP wire protocol. Hosted at Studytube.

A one-day cross-disciplinary technology summit in Amsterdam covering software engineering, cloud and applied AI. Broad programme aimed at developers and technical leads.

The Benelux GCP user group at Xebia — platform, data and Vertex AI content from practitioners rather than from Google's field team. Consistently one of the better-attended cloud meetups in the region.