January 2026 is the moment when artificial intelligence stops being a boardroom opinion and starts becoming muscle memory. Enterprises are no longer debating belief. They are confronting capability. 94% of CEOs say AI skills decide the future, yet only 35% of organizations are actually ready. That gap is not academic. It is financial, cultural, and personal for the people expected to execute inside it.
That pressure is why the AI Skills 2026 Virtual Conference exists, and why it lands on January 22 with intent. Organized by Community Sprints, this is not a vendor parade or a trend safari. It is a four hour, zero cost collision of operators, builders, investors, and product leaders who understand that skills, not models, decide outcomes. 4K+ people have already registered because the market knows when a room matters.
The architecture is deliberate. Paweł Huryn brings product gravity from The Product Compass, where shipping fast is not a slogan but a survival trait. Aakash Gupta brings growth math from Product Growth, informed by scaling Apollo.io and building teams where AI compresses time and expectation. Robert-Rami Youssef of God Of Prompt keeps the conversation grounded in real prompts, agents, and automations. Max Pog, founder of Community Sprints and Venture Studio Family, designs the ecosystem like infrastructure, not theater.
The speakers show up with receipts. Satyajeet Salgar from Google AI talks about leverage at the level of one person building at scale. Angela Elle S., Martijn Lancee, and Pallavi Gupta represent Microsoft’s push to turn AI adoption into repeatable enterprise behavior. Dima Zborovskiy brings Deliveroo and DoorDash case studies that live in production, not slides. Andrew Filev shows what happens when someone who built Wrike to a multibillion dollar outcome bets his next chapter on agentic software.
Capital is not guessing here either. Misti Cain from Techstars San Diego, Max Reiff from IDC Ventures, Haley Bryant from Hustle Fund, and Nathan Beckord from Foundersuite bring four different lenses on what actually gets funded in 2026. Pre-seed, Series A, founder-first, performance-driven. No single narrative, just how money behaves when hype wears thin.
There are panels on building SaaS without code, on agents that move metrics, on turning 16M LinkedIn views into signal instead of noise. Barcelona Supercomputing, God Of Prompt, Fluently, Deliveroo, Google, Microsoft. Different accents, same urgency.
Community Sprints did not assemble a conference. They assembled a stress test for how fast people can think, adapt, and decide together. Four hours. One day. January sets the tone, and the people in this room will decide how the year actually plays out.
