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Date
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Location
The Westin St. Francis,
San Francisco
Format
Chatham House
Rule
Attendance
Invite-Only,
100 delegates

State of Tokenomics SF: the economics of AI.

Tokenomics Foundation is hosting an invite only event for Tokenomics experts to explore the current State of Tokenomics alongside its Governing Board and Technical Steering Committee, plus invited guests.

Apply to Attend  →
By Invitation Only / No Sales or Marketing
The Forum

A debate on the State of AI Economics

The discipline to drive value needs to keep pace with the adoption

On September 23 in Amsterdam we released the State of Tokenomics, the first vendor-neutral survey of how organizations produce, consume, and prove value from AI tokens. More than 400 organizations answered. A few things they told us:

  • Most cannot connect AI spend to a business outcome their CFO would accept.
  • The C-suite and the FinOps teams working the bill disagree on how well value is being measured. The gap is statistically significant, and it widens as companies get bigger.
  • Organizations running a model router are about three times more confident in both their spend visibility and their CFO-grade outcomes than those that are not.
  • Token providers and rented GPUs are bought together, not instead of each other. Cloud token providers skew to frontier models; rented and private hardware skews to open weight.

San Francisco is where we take those findings apart. One day, in a room with the people on both sides of the production function: the large token consumers paying the bill, and the labs, clouds, and hardware providers producing what they buy.

The Tokenomics Foundation is the vendor-neutral, community-built home for the primitives of AI economics. If you produce tokens or pay for them, you should be in the room.

Attendees

Who should be in the room.

Operators selling or buying inference.

Researchers working on pricing, allocation, and compute economics.

Infrastructure teams converting watt into tokens.

Product and finance leads whose AI bill is now a P&L line item.

Labs shipping and pricing frontier models.

Platform teams building the infrastructure inference runs on.

If your company meters, manages and monetizes AI, this is the session.

Program

A working morning, not a conference.

8:00
Breakfast and networking
Arrive, eat, and meet the room. Attendees receive an anonymized composition brief on arrival: sectors, spend bands, and open questions submitted in advance.
Networking
9:00 - 9:30
Welcome and State of Tokenomics
A preview of the State of the Tokenomics practice globally, presented by the Tokenomics Foundation research team.
Talk
9:30 - 10:15
Practitioner engineering panel: proving ROI on AI
Engineering leaders from the consumption side on how their teams measure returns on AI, what they stopped measuring, and how routing and the model portfolio change the unit economics of agentic workloads.
Ambud Sharma (Pinterest) · Dan Neff (Adobe) · Stephen Arthur (Tokenomics Foundation)
Panel
10:15 - 10:45
Break
Coffee, and time to compare notes before the production side takes the floor.
Break
10:45 - 11:25
AI factory panel: from watts to tokens
The production side of the supply chain. How silicon, power, and cloud capacity turn into tokens, how that capacity is priced, provisioned, and sold, and where its economics diverge from cloud.
Raghu (AMD) · Shruti (NVIDIA) · Nebius
Panel
11:25 - 12:00
Discussion forums: AI Production, Consumption, Value
Three parallel tracks, capped at 24 seats each: token governance and policy, unit economics of agentic workloads, and the model portfolio problem.
Tracks
12:00 - 13:15
Networking lunch
Producers and consumers at the same tables, continuing the conversations from the forums.
Networking
How it Works

Three rules the room runs on.

i.

Chatham House Rule

Attendees may use what they hear. They may not identify who said it. Nothing is recorded, nothing is broadcast, and the roster stays with the Foundation.

ii.

Curated by application

Every seat is reviewed by the program committee. The composition of the room is the product. Vendor and supplier seats are extremely limited, and are held for the few whose presence the room asked for.

iii.

Vendor-neutral by charter

The Tokenomics Foundation is a project of the Linux Foundation. No sales people, no marketing people, no product pitches, no sponsored keynotes, no vendor track. Working sessions only.

Venue

Union Square, in the heart of San Francisco.

The Westin St. Francis, San Francisco
The Westin St. Francis
335 Powell Street, San Francisco, CA. Floor details and access instructions go out with the invitation.

The venue is a working room. No stage, no theater seating, no exhibit floor. Round tables, a shared whiteboard, and one screen. The building was chosen because it is quiet, it is private, and it is close to the offices most attendees are already coming from.

Apply

Request an invitation.

Applications open through October 9, 2026. The program committee reviews on a rolling basis. Successful applicants are notified within two weeks, with a hold placed on the date until the invitation is accepted.

Questions on eligibility? Write to us directly.