During SF Tech Week 2026 we teamed up with Twilio to host a dinner for people building conversational AI. It happened on October 6 in San Francisco, with folks from Amazon, DoorDash, and Headspace, among others, around the table.
The invite kept it simple: no agenda, just a good meal with a group of people worth having a ‘conversation’ with.
The venue: The Progress in San Francisco
We hosted the dinner at The Progress on Fillmore Street, in a private dining room with one big round table. We kept the guest list small on purpose. Once a dinner gets much past a dozen people it splits into side conversations, and the whole point was one conversation everyone could actually be part of.
Tech Week is packed with panels, demos, and happy hours, and those are fun. But if you spend your days working on conversational AI, it is surprisingly rare to just sit down with people solving the same problems and talk. That is what we wanted this to be.
Who was at the table
We had people working on conversational AI at Amazon, DoorDash, and Headspace, plus a few other teams, along with the Bluejay and Twilio crews. The conversation covered a bit of everything: what is working in production, what is not, and how to make voice and chat agents genuinely useful for customers.
By the end of the night the group had set up a WhatsApp chat to keep the conversation going, which felt like a good sign. There is also a short recap on LinkedIn.
More dinners like this are coming
We want to keep doing these: small rooms, good food, and people who are deep in the work, in San Francisco and hopefully beyond. If you are working on conversational AI and would like to join the next one, email [email protected] or say hi in our Slack community.
