Inside AI Engineer Paris 2025 Part 3 - How We Organized A Large Conference in 90 Days

In September 2025, we brought AI Engineer to Paris for a two-day conference with 700+ attendees, 25 sponsors, over 47 talks cross 5 tracks.

This is the third post in a 4-part series on the event:

🌟 5 Highlights that Shaped the Stage - our look at the AI trends we saw at AI Engineer Paris.
🚀 How We Built a Photobooth With Flux Kontext + Qwen 3 VLM — a behind-the-scenes look at the AI-powered demo we ran at the Koyeb booth.
🛠 Organizing a Large Conference in 3 Months — how we pulled off a global AI gathering on a tight timeline.
⚡ Model Showcasing Fine-Tuning on Koyeb in Real Time — what it looks like to train and deploy live at a conference.

If you missed AIE Paris, you’ll be able to watch the replays on the Koyeb YouTube channel.

👉 Main Stage Day 1

👉 Main Stage Day 2

If you’re not familiar, the team behind the AI Engineer has been running AI Engineer conferences in the US for the past three years. Their events have become the go-to gathering for AI builders.

When we first met Ben and his team last year, we expected to play a supporting role to help them bring their conference vision to Paris. With our experience organizing dozens of events here each year, we thought we’d simply offer some local insight and connections to make it happen. But one thing led to another, and that “supporting role” quickly turned into something much bigger: we got the unique opportunity to run the entire conference as independent organizers.

⚠️ Important note to readers: We are not an events company, we’re a serverless platform for AI workloads.

And yet, with just three months to do what typically takes a larger team to organize together in a year. It was an intense, fast-paced, and full of surprises to say the least.

In this blog post, we are going to share how we pulled it off: the steps we took, what we learned, and how a small team managed to organize a large, global AI conference in ~90 days.

Planning a conference in fast-forward speed starts with defining the event

With only three months on the clock, our first task was to define the event. Whenever we plan events - which in our case is typically hackathons and developer meetups, again because we are a company building a serverless platform - we ask ourselves a series of questions to set goals, establish priorities, and identify any constraints to give every subsequent decision context and direction.

Here’s how we approached the initial event definition:

Why organize this event? Bringing AI Engineer to Europe for the first time was an amazing opportunity. Not just to host an incredible conference, but to bring together the global AI engineer community to Paris. It was also a chance to grow Koyeb’s brand awareness in a meaningful, developer-focused way.
Who is our target audience? AI builders, engineers, and practitioners looking for actionable insights. We wanted the content to be practical, technical, and relevant.
Where will it take place? Paris. Station F specifically. It’s an iconic startup campus in a converted train depot that fit the spirit of the conference.
How many people are we targeting? We initially planned for 500 people. As interest from sponsors, speakers, and attendees grew, we adjusted our target to 700+.
Who are we organizing this event with? The AI Engineer team was with us every step of the way. Along the way, we were joined by an amazing group of partners and volunteers who helped make AIE Paris happen.
When will it take place? September 23-24. These dates had been soft held at Station F since December 2024. By the time we decided to independently organize the conference in June 2025, they were still the best dates available. It was tight, but we decided to go for it.
What is the total budget and who is paying? We had never organized a conference of this scale, so we had to move fast to estimate costs and secure financial partners. It was a real risk, but one we believed was worth taking.

Getting started: Budget, event infrastructure, distribution

Once the event was defined, we moved on to the next steps to make it real. This meant building a preliminary budget, setting up the infrastructure, and constructing a distribution plan for sponsors, speakers, attendees, press, and more.

Budget everything

The first step was understanding what the event would actually cost. To do that, we drafted a high-level budget covering every known expense. Our first list looked like this:

Venue
Catering
A/V
Furniture & booths
Event app and lead collection
Badges
Travel for team & suppliers
Conference goodies
Legal expenses
Additional signage
Photographer
Videographer
Social media manager
Video post-production

With this list and our event definition in hand, we began reaching out to providers for initial quotes.

Getting those early estimates was critical. It helped us understand the real costs of the conference, identify which vendors could move fast and stay flexible, and spot any that were overpriced and slow to respond.

Setting up event infrastructure: website and registration

With only three months to launch, we couldn’t afford to reinvent the wheel, so we made use of existing products and services as much as possible.

For the AIE Paris website, we built on the existing AI Engineer website, following their typical layout and using their existing components. This helped keep brand identity consistent with previous events and let us go live in days.

For registration and ticketing, we used Luma integrated with Stripe for payments. The setup was quick, customizable-enough for us and reliable.

Using familiar tools and existing systems allowed us to focus our energy where it mattered most: building partnerships, confirming speakers, and coordinating the on-site experience.

Distribution: Getting the word out

The next challenge - in theory - was making sure people knew about the event: sponsors, speakers, attendees, press, the wider AI community.

Thanks to AIE’s strong brand and community, driving attendance, securing sponsorship, and attracting top speakers to the first edition of AI Engineer Paris was easier than we could have imagined, and certainly smoother than if this had been a first-time event.

Looking ahead, if ~~when~~ if we organize another a conference, we’d want to leverage our own communities earlier and across multiple channels to amplify reach even further and ensure the news reaches more potential speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Fortunately, we've built those connections through the regular smaller events that we run. Starting small and building partnerships is important for anyone looking to build up to a large-scale event.

Building an internal event organization hub

Surely, dedicated event planning softwares exist for managing conferences like this one. We didn’t have time to evaluate event management software due to our very limited timeline. Instead, we used Notion to organize all of the information for the conference: schedule, sponsors, speakers, vendor contracts, budgets, checklists, documents.

The result was a single source of truth that kept the team aligned and decisions transparent. And now, we have a reusable Notion template based on the one we created for AIE Paris that can instantly bootstrap future conferences, which will save us even more time on planning in the future.

From this point on, everything started happening in parallel. The next sections cover the main axes of event planning we tackled at the same time: securing providers, sponsors, and speakers.

Securing providers

From A/V and lighting to furniture, expo booths, catering, WiFi, signage, and security, every piece of the conference depended on finding reliable partners who could deliver on short notice.

Choosing Station F: Scaling the venue from 500 to 700 attendees

We chose Station F because it's a venue we know well from hosting previous developer events. It’s a beautiful and unique space as well as a hub for tech and innovation in Paris and all of Europe. Having organized other events at Station F, we already knew their team and their preferred providers well, which meant we didn't have to spend time tracking down and evaluating multiple providors.

We initially aimed for a single-track conference with 500 attendees. The original format included an expo hall, main stage, and workshop space, but after reviewing the CFP submissions, it became clear we needed to include two additional tracks to accommodate the high demand from great speakers.

Fortunately, Station F offered the flexibility to scale by accommodating both our original plan and the expanded setup for 700+ attendees.

View from the AI Engineer Paris expo floor

A/V: Lights, camera, livestream, electricity & more

A major component of any conference is A/V, and we were lucky to work with Eurydice: a provider experienced with Station F events. They handled the entire main stage setup, from lights, to sound, to display, to recording and livestream. They also ran the recordings in breakout rooms, prepared the Expo Hall, and ensured all other providers had the electricity and technical support they needed.

From the beginning, they were reactive and proactive on every aspect where they could contribute to make our event a success. Issues were addressed immediately, and they often anticipated needs before we even raised them. Their energy and professionalism made coordinating multiple tracks and simultaneous activities much smoother, helping us keep everything running on schedule.

Furniture: Expo hall booths, customized decor & more

Depending on your venue and how you plan to use a space, there is typically a lot of furniture you’ll need to rent for a conference. In our case, the big ticket items were:

Booths for our sponsor to exhibit in the Expo Hall
A stage for the Expo Hall
Belly tables and high chairs for networking and eating
A coat check, since Station F doesn’t have one built-in
Custom prints to decorate the space with AIE Paris + sponsor logos

All of the Expo Hall setup came from a single provider, but the scope felt like a jigsaw puzzle. We had furniture rentals, booth designs, custom decor, and signage. Each component needed careful selection and involved a lot of communication with the provider and sponsors, as they needed to provide design details for their booths.

Planning an event in Paris during the month of August

Again, we organized this entire event in just three months, and one of those months was August. If you’ve ever tried to get anything done in France in August, you know where this is going. August in Paris is more than the typical “vacation season” - it’s a cultural institution. Shops close, inboxes go quiet, and laptops remain shut while nearly everyone heads off to rest and recharge.

Our deadlines were already tight as it was, and August meant we'd lose some of our valuable time. We had a lot of moving parts, and while for the most part things were chugging along, there was one wall we hit that’s worth mentioning: we did not the booth design templates before our providers team went on holiday. Now not everyone on that team was off, but everyone who knew how to use the software responsible for handling this part of the project was OOO. We needed those templates ASAP so we could share them with sponsors, who in turn had to brief their own designers. We knew every day counted.

When the files finally arrived, a new challenge appeared: some instructions meant to be in English were missing, mistranslated, or only in French. Thankfully, booth and furniture templates are largely visual and many graphic designers found the process to be intuitive.

We were constantly keeping track of whose designs were pending, verifying the file’s resolution and that print dimensions were respected, as printing large-scale materials requires millimeter precision. Ensuring our Notion tracking was up-to-date was key in making sure no designs slipped through the cracks.

After many check-ins with our sponsors and provider, we pulled it off.

Catering & food

No matter the size or theme, every conference needs good food.

Here’s what we learned:

Keep the crowd onsite. If attendees have to leave to find lunch, you lose both time and momentum. Offering meals and snacks on-site keeps conversations flowing and sessions on schedule.
Design for connection. Coffee stations and snack tables are natural gathering points and some of the best networking happens over croissants and espresso shots.
Plan for all-day focus. Continuous access to coffee, tea, water, and light bites helps maintain attention and energy, especially during long sessions.
Ask early, plan smart. We collected dietary preferences during registration so we could balance portions and options between vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and halal included.

Everything else: Custom badges, event app, WiFi hotspots

Once the big pieces were moving, it was time to lock down the essentials that make the attendee experience work.

Custom Badges & Printing: Station F recommended a local provider who absolutely raced against the clock to provide badge printing machines for our event.
Lead Scanning & Event App: The app became our conference command center: schedules, speaker bios, attendee networking, and sponsor lead capture all in one place. Having it ready ahead of time meant we could onboard speakers, exhibitors, and guests smoothly.
Wi-Fi Hotspots: Because obviously no one can network or demo without reliable internet. We set up multiple hotspots as a safety net (pro tip: never rely entirely on venue Wi-Fi).

It’s easy to overlook these “small” logistics, but together they’re what make the event feel seamless.

Speakers: Hearing from the best AI engineers

A key part of any conference is attracting top-tier talent to share knowledge, insights, and innovations.

Originally, AI Engineer Paris was planned as a single-track, invite-only conference. For the Main Stage, we focused on open-source models and invited founders, CTOs, and builders of foundational AI models.

Andreas Blattmann from Black Forest Labs addresses the audience

The AIE team strongly recommended opening a call for proposals (CFP), which turned out to be a massive success: we received over 500 submissions from more than 300 speakers. Our favorite CFP talks became the Discovery Tracks, while some speakers ended up waitlisted — for those in limbo, we offered a free ticket to attend so they could still benefit from the event.

As with any conference, there are last minute cancellations and unforeseen circumstances. The weekend before the event, the White House announced travel limitations concerning H1B visa holder, which meant we lost two amazing speakers who were advised not to leave the U.S.

Even with these last-minute adjustments, the lineup featured some of the most exciting voices in AI today and played a major role in shaping the energy and quality of the conference.

Thanks again to our amazing speakers! Live stream + talks on Youtube

Sponsors: Supporting AI Engineer & creating the expo hall

Securing sponsors was critical, not just for funding the event, but for building a vibrant expo hall and ensuring a high-quality experience for attendees.

Landing anchor sponsors

The first step was bootstrapping the sponsor prospectus, which gave the event shape by defining the format, schedule, and overall attendee experience. We also built the sponsorship tiers and had to pay careful attention to what we were curating, creating, and promising.

Word first got out about this event through AIE’s newsletter (sign up if you’re not already receiving it). We were immediately flooded by interest to learn more. Then, we started hopping on calls with potential partners to share information and learn how they’d like to get involved..

Thanks to the strong AI Engineer brand, platinum and gold sponsorships sold out much faster than expected. It was clear that speaking opportunities are highly valued. We must have sounded like a broken record telling everyone to get their companies’ top voices to submit an interesting talk if they wanted to land a main stage speaking slot, which until that point we had been keeping to invite-only speakers. This how we landed speakers like Emil, co-founder and CEO of Neo4j and Aparna, co-founder and CPO of Arize AI.

Even when a sponsor paid for a workshop, we stressed that their session had to deliver real value for attendees.

Once confirmed, sponsors needed guidance and support getting ready to exhibit. This included:

Shipping swag to the venue
Designing and setting up booths
Registering their teams
Submitting proposals for workshops or expo stage talks

There was plenty of back-and-forth to answer questions and make sure everything met both sponsor and attendee expectations.

Thanks again to our amazing sponsors!

Schedule: Keeping every moving part in sync

Creating a conference schedule starts with defining the overall structure and general flow, then assigning sessions and components like breaks to time blocks, and finally adjusting and rearranging elements to ensure everything fits and flows by the event day.

Originally, we planned AI Engineer Paris as a single-track conference, but after feedback from sponsors and the overwhelming response to the CFP, we bumped up to 5 tracks. This added complexity, but also increased the quality of the program.

More than anything, the schedule became a vital source of truth. Everyone contributing or attending AIE Paris - attendees, speakers, sponsors, A/V team, venue staff, furniture and booth suppliers - relied on it to know what happens when, where, and with whom. Keeping it up-to-date, clearly communicated, and accessible was crucial to making the conference run smoothly.

Lessons learned from conference planning

In fast-paced conference planning, clarity and decisiveness beat perfection. With only three months on the clock, we had to make key decisions early, based on the constraints we knew, while accepting that adjustments would inevitably be needed along the way.

Logistics, operations, and orchestration are where the real work lives. From contracts and checklists to timelines and on-the-ground coordination, there are countless moving parts that need constant attention. Staying organized, keeping a single source of truth, and ensuring clear communication with all stakeholders are critical to prevent details from slipping through the cracks.

Here are a few takeaways from our experience:

Make early decisions, even if all information isn’t perfect. Adjustments will come.
Treat your schedule and central planning hub as the ultimate source of truth.
Communication is everything — between internal teams, vendors, sponsors, and speakers.
Expect last-minute changes; build flexibility into every part of planning.
Prioritize high-impact decisions (venue, A/V, sponsors, speakers) first, then layer in the details.

Early-stage conference planning is intense, but focusing on clarity, organization, and adaptability lets you deliver a high-quality experience — even on a compressed timeline.