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Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences

See all data and research on:
Artificial Intelligence

What you should know about this indicator

  • AI conferences serve as essential platforms for researchers to present their findings and network with peers and collaborators.
  • Over the past two decades, these conferences have expanded in scale, quantity, and prestige.
  • Attendance data should be interpreted with caution, as many conferences in recent years have adopted virtual or hybrid formats.
  • Virtual conferences often attract larger and more global audiences, but exact attendance figures are harder to measure.
  • The AI Index reports total attendance, including virtual, hybrid, and in-person participation, across conferences such as AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, EMNLP, ICLR, and others.
  • The significant spike in ICML attendance in 2021 was likely due to the conference being held virtually that year.
Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences
Thirteen major conferences are included.
Source
AI Index Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 8, 2025
Next expected update
April 2026
Date range
2010–2024
Unit
attendees

Related research and writing

Artificial intelligence has advanced despite having few resources dedicated to its development — now investments have increased substantially

Max Roser

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

AI Index Report

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
April 8, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_report_2025.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Yolanda Gil, Vanessa Parli, Njenga Kariuki, Emily Capstick, Anka Reuel, Erik
Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald,
Tobi Walsh, Armin Hamrah, Lapo Santarlasci, Julia Betts Lotufo, Alexandra Rome, Andrew Shi, Sukrut Oak. “The AI Index 2025
Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2025

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
April 8, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_report_2025.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Yolanda Gil, Vanessa Parli, Njenga Kariuki, Emily Capstick, Anka Reuel, Erik
Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald,
Tobi Walsh, Armin Hamrah, Lapo Santarlasci, Julia Betts Lotufo, Alexandra Rome, Andrew Shi, Sukrut Oak. “The AI Index 2025
Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2025

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Edouard Mathieu, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from AI Index Report. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

AI Index Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

AI Index Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences” [dataset]. AI Index Report, “AI Index Report” [original data]. Retrieved March 31, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/attendance-major-artificial-intelligence-conferences.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear