The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) has set the program for its Advanced Vision and AI Conference 2026, scheduled for Sept. 23-24 in Santa Clara, CA. The two-day agenda brings together 25 speakers drawn from autonomous-vehicle, semiconductor, energy, and industrial-manufacturing organizations around the production-readiness of vision and AI stacks.

What does the keynote lineup include?

Four keynote speakers anchor the main stage. Waymo distinguished engineer Vincent Vanhoucke (Mountain View, CA) headlines the program.

• Alvin Clark — global developer relations manager, industrial and manufacturing, NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA)
• Torsten Kroeger — chief science officer, Intrinsic (Mountain View, CA)
• Todd Matsler — senior director and GM, manufacturing segment, Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA)

A separate fireside chat pairs Rashmi Misra, chief AI officer and board executive (Independent), with A3 vice president of education strategies Robert Huschka (Ann Arbor, MI).

Which featured talks address metrology-level concerns?

Two sessions speak directly to the calibration and inspection concerns that drive test-and-measurement buying decisions.

Sparsh Gautam, computer vision engineer at Tesla (Austin, TX), will examine sensor calibration and physical drift in real-world vision systems. His talk addresses the regime where lab characterization of noise, dynamic range, and spectral response diverges from field performance on a deployed line.

That gap forces field-recalibration intervals tighter than the laboratory sheet suggests. Camera gain, exposure timing, and pixel geometry drift with temperature cycling, mechanical shock, and aging analog front-end components that shift reference voltages inside the image sensor.

Jaron Kuppers, technology manager for robotics and computer vision at GE Vernova (Cambridge, MA), will cover intelligent industrial inspection and AI for asset-monitoring workflows in power and grid environments. False-positive and missed-defect rates in those inspections carry direct compliance weight for the operator, with misclassifications triggering audit findings under regional reliability frameworks.

How does the two-track format split the audience?

The conference splits into two parallel tracks. The business track serves operations and strategy leaders evaluating how vision, AI, and automation improve productivity, resilience, competitiveness, and long-term operations. The technical track serves engineering teams that build, integrate, and scale intelligent automation systems into production.

A3 framed the program around a recurring buyer question: which emerging technologies remain in pilot, and which have crossed into deployment-grade readiness for regulated production environments?

What floor opportunities let buyers compare claims to measured performance?

Vendor exhibits and a reception run alongside the sessions. The floor time matters for the program's central promise — letting specifiers test vendor datasheet claims about accuracy, frame rate, depth resolution, and inference latency against throughput, false-reject rate, and drift behavior they observe on their own lines.

The exhibit hall also serves as a venue where integrators can press vendors on the field-calibration protocols Gautam will outline in his session.

What does the speaker mix reveal about maturity signals?

The lineup places every major layer of the vision-and-AI stack in one room — autonomy from Waymo and Tesla, silicon from NVIDIA and Intel, robotics software from Intrinsic, and asset-monitoring end use from GE Vernova. For a buyer comparing vendors on production readiness, the cross-section narrows the field travel an audit would otherwise require.

What adoption and compliance question does the calibration focus raise?

Buyers specifying cameras and inference stacks for line-side inspection must now answer three concrete questions:

• What field-recalibration interval survives thermal cycling and mechanical shock on a moving line?
• What counts as traceable drift correction across a multi-camera array?
• Which standards body will first publish a procedure that holds up to external audit?

A3 has not yet released the full session catalog beyond the featured speakers. Registration is open at automate.org/events/advanced-vision-and-ai-conference.