Free AI events in Chicago

You don't have to spend a dollar to plug into Chicago's AI scene. Every free AI event in the city, gathered in one place and verified daily: meetups, workshops, hackathons, and talks with no ticket price.

Meetups Workshops Hackathons Conferences Networking

Oct

Tue

9:00 AM – 7:00 PM CDT

Bank.AI Summit Chicago

Four Seasons Hotel Chicagoby Creatio

Creatio's Chicago summit convenes banking and credit-union executives for AI use cases, live agent demonstrations, governance discussions and peer networking.

ConferenceFreeIntermediateBusinessDevelopers

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM CDT

Tiller: Structure, Gates, and State for Human + Agent Teams

TeamWorking by TechNexusby Agent Loop Chicago

An Agent Loop Chicago technical meetup on structuring collaborative software development between people and AI agents, with a presentation from Made In Tandem's JC Grubbs.

MeetupFreeIntermediateDevelopers

Nov

Tue

9:00 AM – 5:30 PM CST

Datadog Summit Chicago

Convene at Willis Towerby Datadog Chicago

A free day of Chicago sessions for developers, SREs, security practitioners and AI builders on observability, agentic capabilities and practical production systems.

ConferenceFreeIntermediateDevelopersBusiness

Nov

Thu

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM CST

Generative AI Transformers: A Deep Dive

Aon Centerby Chicago Cloud Computing Meetup Group

A Chicago Cloud Computing Meetup technical walkthrough of transformer internals, from embeddings and attention to agents and AI application harnesses.

MeetupFreeIntermediateDevelopersStudents