TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: The AI Sessions Worth Your Time, and Where to Meet Lilidi

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 runs from 13 to 15 October at Moscone West in San Francisco, and TechCrunch expects more than 10,000 attendees. Lilidi will be there: Tetiana Stepanets, our founder, is bringing a live Lilidi Twin, the AI employee we build for customer conversations.

We read the agenda with one question in mind: which sessions help a founder who is putting AI agents in front of customers? These are the six we picked, followed by where to find us.

The cover and the San Francisco image below are illustrations made for this article, not photos from the event.

The essentials

• Dates: Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 October 2026.
• Venue: Moscone West, 800 Howard Street, San Francisco.
• Agenda: the official TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 agenda, checked on 5 October 2026. Times can still change, so check it on the day.

Six AI sessions worth your time

All times are San Francisco time. The notes under each session are our own view, not TechCrunch's description.

1. Tue 13 Oct · 9:30-10:10 · Builders Stage

   What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap

   Rob Toews (Radical Ventures), Linda Tong (Webflow) and Michel Tricot (Airbyte)

   Every AI startup worries that the next model release will make its product a feature. We want to hear how teams decide what to build on top of the models and what to own themselves.

2. Tue 13 Oct · 11:10-11:30 · Builders Stage

   The Builder's Playbook: What Founders Need to Win the Agentic Era

   Stephan Bitton (Google Cloud)

   A short session aimed at founders who build agents. Disclosure: Lilidi is in the Google for Startups Cloud Program.

3. Tue 13 Oct · 1:30-2:20 pm · Breakout Stage

   Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents

   Steve Androulakis and Sachin Malhotra (Anthropic)

   How people hand real work to agents every day. It is the question our own customers ask most.

4. Tue 13 Oct · 2:15-2:45 pm · Disrupt Stage

   Can AI Keep Scaling?

   Andrew Feldman (Cerebras Systems)

   The speed and cost of inference decide what a live voice or video agent can do in real time. It overlaps with the Anthropic session above, so pick one.

5. Wed 14 Oct · 1:50-2:20 pm · Roundtable 1

   Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Separating Signal from Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders

   Ankita Mehta (Databricks)

   The session closest to our own work: agents in sales and operations, and how to tell what works from what is hype.

6. Wed 14 Oct · 2:45-3:15 pm · Disrupt Stage

   What We Believe Now

   Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria (Benchmark)

   For founders who are raising: five partners of one firm on one stage.

Also on the AI Stage: Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, on "The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category". TechCrunch announced the talk on 2 October without a time, so check the agenda.

What we are bringing

Tetiana will have a live Lilidi Twin on her phone. In about a minute you can:

• ask it a question about a business and hear it answer only from approved knowledge;
• ask how booking works and see how a Twin books a meeting in the owner's calendar;
• ask what it is: it always says it is an AI.

We want to meet business owners who lose leads after hours, partners working on calendars, video, voice and customer tools, and investors. Request a meeting or see Lilidi at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.

What our last events taught us

Before Disrupt we went to RAISE Summit in Paris, TechBBQ in Copenhagen and AI Summit Barcelona. Three lessons we are bringing to San Francisco:

• Nobody asks about the model. At TechBBQ the questions we heard most were where the answers come from, what stops the AI from saying something wrong, and whether it can join real calls. People shop for accountability, not for models.
• Approved knowledge first. In Barcelona, founders kept giving the same answer: yes to an AI taking the first conversation, but only if it speaks from what the company signed off and hands over when it does not know.
• Show, don't tell. The moment people talked to a Twin themselves, the conversation changed. At Disrupt the demo comes first.

The full recaps: TechBBQ 2026 and AI Summit Barcelona 2026. Every event we go to is on the events page.

After Disrupt

We will publish a recap with our own photos, the people we met and what they asked, as we did for TechBBQ and Barcelona.

Questions people ask about Lilidi at Disrupt

Related: Lilidi at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 · What is an AI employee? · Talk to a live Twin