Open-Sourcing All Day AI: The Playbook for a 12,000+ Attendee Conference

Signup Write New Story Open-Sourcing All Day AI: The Playbook for a 12,000+ Attendee Conference by Brian Turcotte by Brian Turcotte | @ bturcotte DevRel in NYC.

All Day AI was a free, online, 16-hour marathon event with zero vendor pitches. We pulled it together in about two months, saw 12,313 participants and 140 speakers, and people stayed and watched for an average of more than 6 hours.

An event of this scale doesn’t come together that fast without some serious sprinting, trial and error, and audible-calling. Plenty of people have asked how we did it, so this article open-sources the whole playbook: the goals, the team, the tools, the timeline, and the parts we’d change.

We built All Day AI for people who were under pressure to put AI to work but struggling to find advice they could trust. The tools and recommendations were changing week to week, and a lot of the conversation still led back to something for sale. We wanted a place where practitioners could explain what they had actually shipped, what had failed, and what another team could reuse.

That need shaped the format. Keeping the event free and online meant people could join from wherever they worked, without a ticket budget, a flight, or a travel approval. Banning vendor pitches kept the focus on useful lessons rather than a sales conversation. Across Build, Lead, Secure, and Ship, the goal was to give people clearer answers and peers they could keep learning with after the day ended.

The first version of our website went up in August, and the event was slated to go live on October 22. That gave us roughly two months to hit our admittedly aggressive goals:

What made those numbers hard was that we were starting from zero. There was no existing All Day AI community, no speakers signed up, no website, no event platform, and no social presence. Every registrant and every speaker had to come from something we built or someone we reached in those two months.

If you’ve run an online event with multiple speakers, you know that even one track can be a logistical nightmare. We knew 120+ speakers across 4 tracks could get ugly, fast, so most of what follows is about how we kept it from getting ugly: a committed team, a few deliberate bets, and a lot of help from AI agents.

The most important part of the ADAI stack was the people. The core organizing team had more than 20 people across event co-founders, moderators, hackathon judges, ushers, and marketers, and they worked quickly and unselfishly through the build-up and especially on the day of. The team brought experience from organizations including Anaconda, Matejczyk Group, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, Techstrong Group, ACI Worldwide, and Community Hackathons, produced by Crowdbyte Solutions.

This was a community event, so all of it fell outside everyone’s day job. Nobody was paid to make All Day AI happen, and the fact that it happened anyway is a credit to how much the team believed in the project. They deserve not only credit but admiration.

Before we picked a single tool, we made a few decisions about what kind of event this would be. Those decisions shaped everything else, and in hindsight they did more for our numbers than any piece of software.

With those bets in place, the job became execution, and the tools we chose were all about saving the team’s time for the work only people could do.

We wanted to spend as little time and money as possible on event infrastructure, so we looked for a platform that could natively handle 5 stages, registration forms, communications, and recording. We landed on Zuddl, which was modular enough to meet our requirements without us stitching together separate tools.

Version 1 was built in Kilo Code for VS Code using GPT 5.6 and cost about $5. It was stored in GitHub, deployed to Vercel, and used Cloudflare for domain management. Because the speaker lineup and partner list changed constantly, the site had to change constantly too. The team and I made PRs as the event evolved, and I approved and merged them.

Here’s where we had to get crafty. We wanted to attract top speakers across the AI industry, and quality speakers want a clear point of contact with a name and a quick response time. A shared, generic email address wasn’t going to cut it, so we used mine.

That solved the trust problem and created a volume problem: one person fielding 140 speakers’ worth of email. To manage it, I used a series of AI agents with a human-in-the-loop editorial process.

Plans are one thing. Here’s what the two months looked like in practice, including the moments where it nearly fell apart.

Looking back at that timeline, most of the stress came in the last ten days, and most of it traces back to things we deferred while we chased registrations.

Earlier, more frequent speaker ops. Because we were crunched for time, we prioritized carefully: once a speaker was on board, we considered them done and moved on to other operational work. We should have made time for multiple dry runs, kept up ongoing comms with speakers, and gotten earlier commitments to scheduled sessions. No-shows were low, but they weren’t zero, and we can plan for that next year.

Platform training for moderators and volunteers. We were lucky to have most of the moderation team in person in Austin, so we could squeeze in a day of last-minute Zuddl training. It takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get a speaker prepped and on stage, and it would have been less stressful to train moderators and ushers further in advance, ideally before the October 12 rehearsal rather than after it.

A dedicated speaker inbox. Reminder to myself for next year: don’t use my work email for speaker comms. The agents kept it manageable, but a separate, named inbox would have given speakers the same personal point of contact without burying my day job.

All Day AI went from 100 registrations to more than 12,000 in about two months, built by volunteers, a $5 website, and a handful of agents. If you want to see what came out of it, you can watch all the recordings here. And if you want to be part of the next one, sign up for next year here.

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