Events & Community
Where AI Professionals Gather
From the Southeast's largest AI conference to free live webinars, workshops, and a 5,000+ member meetup community.
Live Events
Conferences & In-Person Events
Join us in person for conferences, meetups, workshops, and executive dinners across the Southeast.
Get Unstuck with Mark Hinkle
A three-hour working session — not a presentation. Bring one business process that is stuck: a client intake form, a pricing calculator, an internal tracker, a simple website, an automation. Bring the spreadsheet or the subscription tool you are paying for today, because seeing the current mess makes the rebuild faster. Mark works alongside 15 people for the morning, and you leave with a working, custom-built tool you own outright — no code, no recurring subscription. $45 for echo members, $75 for non-members. 15 seats only.
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All Things AI 2027
The Southeast's largest AI conference returns for its third year. Two days — Training Day (March 22) and Conference Day (March 23) — of keynotes, workshops, and hands-on training across multiple tracks covering AI strategy, engineering, governance, and enterprise transformation. Founded by Todd Lewis (All Things Open) and Mark Hinkle (The AIE Network).
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Webinars & Online Sessions
Free webinars on AI strategy, tools, and implementation. Register to join us live.
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Past Events
A look back at where the AIE Network community has gathered.
All Things AI 2026
The second annual All Things AI conference drew 4,000+ attendees across 6 tracks. Two days of keynotes, workshops, and hands-on training with speakers from McKinsey, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Amazon, and 70+ more.
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RDU AI Monthly Meetup
Monthly gathering of the All Things AI community (5,000+ members). Featured talks on AI agents in production and hands-on prompt engineering workshop.
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All Things AI 2025
The inaugural All Things AI conference drew 1,600+ attendees for two days of AI-focused sessions, workshops, and networking. The event established Durham as a hub for AI practitioners and business leaders.
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Past Webinars
A look back at our previous webinars on AI strategy, tools, and implementation.
Build Skills — Teach Your AI Agents How You Work
The difference between an AI that gives generic answers and an AI that works like a trusted teammate comes down to one thing: skills. A skill is a reusable playbook — your rules, your voice, your process — written down once so your AI can apply it every time. Write it once, and every draft comes out in your voice, every report follows your format, and every task runs your way without re-explaining yourself in every chat. Mark Hinkle will show you how to write your first skill — and how the same file can work across the AI tools you already use. No technical background required.
Vibe Coding: Build a Professional Website with AI — No Coding Required
What if you could go from 'I have a business idea' to a live, professional website in about an hour — without writing a single line of code yourself? In this hands-on workshop, you'll use AI tools to build and deploy a real, production-ready website with contact forms, newsletter signup, SEO optimization, mobile responsiveness, accessibility compliance, and security headers. You'll tell the AI what you want, and a team of 19 specialized AI skills will handle the implementation. No coding experience required — if you can describe what you want in plain English, you have everything you need.
The Path to Becoming AI-First: An Operator's Playbook
What happens when a recruiting operator — not a software engineer — decides to rebuild his company around AI? In this live lunch & learn session, James Horne, Director of Delivery at Axiom Path, shares how his team built 25+ AI automations and digital employees that now operate alongside human recruiters — screening candidates, managing workflows, and turning 21,000+ historical recruiting notes into a searchable knowledge system. James will demonstrate a live voice AI built to talk about itself and its role in Axiom Path and their AI Transformation. This session explores what it really means to become AI-first: starting with process, increasing leverage, and learning how to manage digital employees alongside human employees. This is not a coding talk. It’s an operator’s blueprint.
Securing Your Model Context Protocol Footprint
Leaders across industries are using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to put tools in the hands of their AI agents, so they can do real work and drive measurable return on AI investments. However, it’s critical that MCP be implemented with guardrails to protect against malicious actors and unintended actions. Stacklok will show you how to use its open source ToolHive MCP platform to curate a trusted MCP registry and implement auth, token exchanges and other security best practices so you can put MCP into production.
Building Agents with Granite Workshop
In this workshop, we will explore writing AI agents using IBM Granite AI models. We will touch on what are AI agents and explore some different designs for agent development. These designs are informed by the experiences of IBMers in developing agents. Our first agent will be a basic Function Calling Agent where we will build the agent from scratch to learn how agents work. We will then explore other agent designs such as Plan-and-Solve, Route-and-Solve, ToolRAG, and ReAct. The workshop agents will use LangGraph with LangChain in their implementations and use IBM Granite as the language model.
Ops & DevSecOps Guardrails for Agents
Agents writing code is one thing, but agents involved with infrastructure are something else entirely. In this final session of our lunch-and-learn series, we move from developer workflows into operations — like CI/CD pipelines, cloud environments, Kubernetes clusters, observability systems — and the governance questions that follow. What does safe autonomy look like when an agent can read signals, form a hypothesis, and propose (or execute) change? This session is about guardrails before scale. We will explore how ops-focused agents actually behave in modern environments, the risk in places teams are already exposed, and baseline controls that make experimentation possible without increasing blast radius.
Automating Your Business with AI and Make.com
AI is getting a lot of attention, but most teams are still asking the same practical question: how do we use it to actually improve the way work gets done? In this session, Ricardo Govindasamy will show how businesses can combine AI and Make.com to automate real workflows, reduce manual effort, connect disconnected systems, and move work faster with less friction. This webinar is designed for builders, operators, and automation enthusiasts who want to go beyond theory and see how AI-powered workflows can create real operational value.
RoR Course: The Rebel Frame & the Illusion of Thinking
Artificial Intelligence did not begin with Silicon Valley. It began with philosophers, mathematicians, and rebels who refused to accept that intelligence was mystical. Inspired by Rebels of Reason: The Long Road from Aristotle to ChatGPT & AI’s Heroes Who Kept the Faith by John Willis with Derek Lewis, this 8-part live course explores how AI evolved — not as a hype cycle, but as a centuries-long intellectual revolution. Over eight bi-weekly sessions, we explore how AI learned to count, formalize logic, compute, search, represent knowledge, learn from data, model uncertainty, and ultimately generate language. No heavy math or technical prerequisites are required.