IBM at NY Tech Week 2025

Claim your spot at the place to be for Tech Week

IBM is going big at NY Tech Week this year as one of the official sponsors of the week. With 800+ events across the city, Big Blue is hosting a dozen events in its completely new NYC flagship office at One Madison.

Join IBM and its partners for exciting panels, masterclasses, networking cocktail hours and beyond. Where else can you build an AI agent in 5 minutes, program a Quantum computer from your laptop, or hear directly from executives about AI in sports? Whatever space you’re in; we’ve got you covered.

See our full list of IBM events below. Note that all events require registration, so request your spot ASAP.

We hope to see you during NY Tech Week.

Agenda

The Empire State is executing a full-stack upgrade from concrete jungle to an AI and quantum computing capital.

See how New York has created a powerhouse ecosystem of government, private companies and universities to achieve the twenty-first century’s biggest computing breakthroughs right in its backyard. Join us during NY Tech Week to connect with the architects of this revolution.

Speakers:

Marty Schmidt, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Mukesh Khare, GM Semiconductors & VP Hybrid Cloud, IBM
Stacie Bloom, Chief Research Officer, NYU
Havidán Rodríguez, President, University at Albany
Ben Verschueren, Executive Director of NYSTAR, NY Empire State Development

The cash flowing into quantum and AI startups is rewiring NYC's tech landscape—and you're invited to the briefing on what's next. Get the inside scoop on which technologies are making VCs open their checkbooks, and how New York's unique ecosystem is amplifying returns.

IBM Global Head of VC Emily Fontaine joins top industry innovators to reveal where the smart money is being bet in 2025. Whether you're launching a startup, hunting for funding or hoping to catch the latest market trends, this is your window into tomorrow's breakthroughs.

Speakers:

Emily Fontaine, Global Head of VC, IBM
Jennifer Tegan, Managing Director, NY Ventures
Julie Samuels, President & CEO, Tech:NYC
Krystal Hu, VC & Startups reporter, Reuters

From coding to courtside, AI is transforming the game—and not just for athletes. It’s optimizing performance, preventing injuries, reimagining fan experience, and opening up billion-dollar frontiers.

Join a powerhouse lineup from IBM, a16z, the USTA, visionary tech founders and elite athletes for a deep dive into the future of sports powered by relentless innovation. This conversation isn’t about what’s coming—it’s about what’s already here, and what’s next. Stick around after the panel for a high-energy networking happy hour with the minds building the future of the game.

Speakers:

Deborah Embaie, Partner, a16z Cultural Leadership Fund
Shannon Miller, Senior Partner, IBM
Kirsten Corio, Chief Commercial Officer, USTA
Judene Small, Strategic Partnerships Partner, Cultural Leadership Fund, a16z
Baron Davis, 2x NBA All-Star, Founder + CEO, Business Inside the Game
Brennan Scarlett, NFL player, Creative Entrepreneur Founder, Scarlett Creative Co. & Big Yard Foundation
Dan O’Brien, Director of Sports Medicine, National Basketball Players Association

Join us 28 floors up at Le Jardin sur Madison, atop IBM’s new NYC headquarters at One Madison Avenue, for a golden hour cocktail reception bringing together the builders, dreamers and decision-makers shaping what’s next in NYC tech.

Co-hosted by IBM, Tech:NYC, Union Square Ventures and HumanX, this isn’t your average networking event. It’s an evening to kick back with a cocktail, connect with fellow founders, business leaders, policy makers and future-shapers—all while soaking in skyline views.

From AI to quantum, we’re gathering the people turning NYC into a city built on code and creativity, not just concrete. Come for the vibes, and stay for the conversations that might just spark the next big thing.

Featured hosts:

Emily Fontaine, Global Head of Venture Capital, IBM
Julie Samuels, President and CEO, Tech:NYC
Fred Wilson, Co-founder & Partner, Union Square Ventures
Andrew Blum, Co-founder, HumanX

This workshop explores the case study of the world's first multicultural and multilingual AI Safety Red Teaming Challenge focused on Asia-Pacific, conducted by Humane Intelligence and IMDA Singapore. You'll get hands-on experience using our no-code platform to perform actual red teaming exercises that identify cultural biases and linguistic vulnerabilities across diverse contexts, equipping you with practical skills to evaluate and improve AI systems through inclusive testing methodologies.

This event is hosted by the AI Alliance, a collaborative network of companies, startups, universities, research institutions, government organizations, and non-profit foundations working at the forefront of AI technology to create the future of open, safe, and responsible AI.

Host: Sarah Amos, Product Manager, Humane Intelligence

Prompting is a common first point of contact between people and large language models (LLMs). The quality of the prompt heavily influences the output of the model, the successful maintenance of system guardrails and the overall user experience. Prompt creation is often highly dependent on specialized knowledge and can be challenging for non-AI experts because it’s iterative, time consuming and prompting practices are constantly evolving. To address these problems, Responsible Prompting is an LLM-agnostic, lightweight recommender system that aims to dynamically support users in crafting prompts that reflect responsible intentions and help avoid undesired or negative outputs. In this workshop, we will show how Responsible Prompting API works and how it can be customized to your needs.

Host: Dr. Vagner Santana, Staff Research Scientist, Master Inventor, and member of the Responsible Tech Team at IBM Watson Research Center

AI agents aren’t the future—they’re already changing how high-performing teams operate today. Join us for an exclusive lunch session for a game plan on how to empower your teams to tap AI agents that take on repetitive tasks, streamline workflows and give back time for high-impact work—no coding required.

We’ll share real-world use cases, do live demos and explore how business leaders are deploying AI to move faster, boost output and drive smarter decisions across their organizations. Come for the lunch. Leave with a game plan to scale productivity with AI.

IBM workshop leaders:

Kelly To, Product Manager, IBM,
Sabtain Khan, Product Manager, IBM

Think AI agents are just buzzwords? In this hands-on session, you’ll actually build one from scratch using IBM® watsonx Orchestrate™—no prior experience needed, just big ideas. In 5 minutes, you’ll create an AI agent that can automate tasks such as scheduling meetings, drafting emails, pulling reports and more. Come with ideas, leave with an AI agent that gets things done.

IBM workshop leaders:

Kelly To, Product Manager, IBM,
Sabtain Khan, Product Manager, IBM

Docling, is an easy-to-use, self-contained, MIT licensed, open-source toolkit for document conversion that can parse several types of popular document formats into a unified, richly-structured representation. It is powered by state-of-the-art specialized AI models for layout analysis (DocLayNet) and table structure recognition (TableFormer), and it can be run on a laptop. With Docling, it’s easy to implement extensions, new features, models and customizations. Docling has already been integrated in other popular open-source frameworks (for example, LangChain, LlamaIndex, spaCy), making it a natural fit for the processing of documents and the development of high-end applications. The open-source community has fully engaged in using, promoting and developing for Docling, which recently made it a #1 trending repository on Github.

Host: Ming Zhao, Open-source Developer and Developer Advocate, IBM Research

To date, AI has consumed nearly all publicly available data. This raises an urgent question: Where can the next wave of data available for AI come from? Non-public, sometimes sensitive or private data could be made available for AI if the right governance structures were placed around the use of such data. In this workshop, OpenMined will showcase an open-source protocol that can underpin a unified marketplace for AI, where private and licensed data sources can be securely networked, strictly controlled and appropriately attributed.

Host: Subha Ramkumar, Technical Product Manager, OpenMined

In 90 minutes, IBM® Quantum educators will take you from zero to hero, with a crash course on quantum mechanics and a hands-on coding tutorial. By the end of the workshop, you can expect to be familiar with the basics of Qiskit, our Python SDK for programming quantum computers, as well as the underlying quantum mechanics that we use to compute.

We will spend time exploring the IBM Quantum platform and additional educational assets that you can use to continue your journey in quantum. We recommend that you are familiar with Python basics before this workshop. No prior physics experience is necessary.

IBM workshop leaders:

Olivia Lanes, Global Lead, IBM Quantum Content and Education, IBM
Annaliese Estes, Academic Community Manager, IBM

Financial institutions have become unexpected pioneers in enterprise AI transformation – offering a valuable roadmap for organizations across all sectors seeking to improve their AI outcomes and embrace uncertainty.

Join us for an exclusive lunch session exploring fresh insights from IBM’s new 2025 CEO Study and more. We'll examine why 60% of banking CEOs recognize that they must accept significant risk if they want to harness automation and stay competitive — and how these same principles can apply to your industry. You'll learn how forward-thinking financial institutions are aligning data, AI and strategies across ecosystems — creating approaches that translate seamlessly to other sectors looking to accelerate AI ROI.

Audience: Finance, Directors/VPs

IBM host:

Shanker Ramamurthy, Managing Partner - Global Banking & Financial Markets, IBM

As AI ushers in a new era, New York is uniquely positioned to reaffirm its place at the forefront of global innovation, drawing upon its wide array of industries and robust talent pool. This evolution brings both a challenge and an imperative: preparing the workforce to collaborate with AI to unlock potential across every sector that defines New York’s vibrant economy. Join IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux and other industry leaders as they share how they’re reshaping work and empowering employees to harness AI to enhance human ingenuity and drive business growth. Don’t miss the chance to gain actionable insights on building a future-ready workforce and solidifying New York’s role as global tech powerhouse.

Panelist:

Nickle LaMoreaux, Chief Human Resources Officer, IBM
Julie Samuels, President & CEO, Tech:NYC

Moderated by:
- Kevin J. Delaney, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, Charter

This panel will feature experts from across disciplines—policy, technology, enterprise and academia—to discuss how businesses, even highly regulated ones, can effectively use open-source AI to achieve their goals. For leaders struggling to advance AI from POC to implementation and scale, learning how to use the right open-source tools can increase your ROI on AI and prepare you for future innovation.

Panelists: