Deploying the Autonomous Future
Wednesday, November 11 to Thursday, November 12, 2026
Santa Monica Proper Hotel
Santa Monica, CA
100 seats, by invitation. Sold out every year since 2022.
Keynote Speaker
Russ Tedrake is Co-Founder & CEO of Walden Robotics and a Professor at MIT. Previously SVP of Large Behavior Models at Toyota Research Institute, Russ is a pioneer in robotic learning and dexterous manipulation, now building the physical AI putting general-purpose humanoids to work on real factory floors.
Keynote Speaker
Saman Farid is the Founder & CEO of Formic, a robotics-as-a-service company helping U.S. manufacturers deploy automation at scale. By removing the financial and operational barriers to adoption, he’s enabling enterprises to achieve the throughput, quality, and safety they need to grow. Previously, Saman ran Baidu Ventures’ $600M global investment fund and founded Comet Labs, an AI-focused fund and incubator. He now serves as an investor or board member for 25+ robotics, technology, and AI companies.
Keynote Speaker
Les Karpas is the Inception Global Head of Physical AI at NVIDIA, and an EON Advisory Board member. Les is building his session around a central question: How do we turn human experience and simulated worlds into robots that perform useful work reliably?
As robotics shifts toward data and validation, the discussion will explore how real-world training data, simulation, and robot foundation models work together and what it takes to translate those advances into reliable commercial deployments.
Additional speakers to be announced soon.
EON is an exclusive, invite-only event for the visionaries and leaders at the forefront of physical AI—building and deploying to solve practical business problems across industries.
Now in its fifth year, EON attracts innovators, founders, engineers, executives, academics, and investors for unscripted conversation (and debate!), networking, and thought-provoking panels.
There is no expo floor, but plenty of space for ideas and interpersonal connection.
One venue. Two days of real, candid dialogue.
PAST ATTENDEES HAVE INCLUDED
PRIOR SPEAKERS:
Rodney Brooks, MIT, Stanford, and iRobot
Henrik Christensen, University of California, San Diego
Raffaello D'Andrea, Verity
Drew Dixon, Riddell
Paul Dunphy, International Aerospace Coatings
Doug Fidaleo, The Walt Disney Company
Adrien Gaidon, Toyota Research Institute
Jonathan Hurst, PhD, Agility Robotics
Ariyan Kabir, GrayMatter Robotics
Hiroaki Kitano, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Schoo and Sony
Dr. Kevin Knight, DiDi, USC
Scott Komar, Driscoll's
Zornitsa Kozareva, PhD, Facebook AI, Google, Amazon
Geert-Jan Kruijff, Amazon Music
Aaron Lamberg, Pierce Manufacturing
Matt Mason, Carnegie Mellon University
Paul Mikesell, Carbon Robotics
Brad Porter, Cobot
Vic Smith, JV Smith Companies
Peter Stone, The University of Texas, Austin and SonyAI
Dr. Manuela Veloso, JPMorganChase
David Yang, ABBYY, Newo.ai, and Morfeus.ai
2026 EON Advisory Board Members
Tim Dykstra Co-Founder at Nascent Scale
Doug Fidaleo Director, Disney Research Imagineering at The Walt Disney Company
Les Karpas Head of Physical AI at NVIDIA
Scott Komar Senior Vice President of Global R&D at Driscoll’s
Paolo Pirjanian Vice President, Delivery Automation, Last Mile at Amazon
Carl Showalter Ex-COO, Fetch Robotics, Robotics Consultant
Kevin Dunlap Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Calibrate Ventures
Jason Schoettler Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Calibrate Ventures
ATTENDING EON
Attendance is by invitation
Request an invitation below, or be nominated by someone in the community; every request is reviewed and approved guests receive a private registration link.
Apply to attend:
Event ticket includes:
A one-night stay at the Santa Monica Proper Hotel, November 11
All meals and drinks across both days, including the EON Dinner
Two Days of curated sessions and unscripted conversation
Nominate an attendee:
PARTNER WITH EON:
A handful of partners join the room each year. Partners are not on the outside of this event looking in. They are in the sessions, at the dinner, and part of the conversations.
partnerships@eon.events
EON ORGANIZER:
