From Pilot to Production: Previewing Rhino’s 2026 Federate AI Summit
For most of the past decade, federated AI has been proving its efficacy and value in pilots. Multi-site studies across hospitals, pharma companies, and research networks have shown that models can train on distributed data without that data ever leaving the institutions that hold it.
The harder questions arrive after the proof of concept has been validated. Who governs a model that competitors helped train? How does a model stay accurate when every site's scanners, formats, and patient populations differ? What infrastructure does it take to run compute across dozens of sites at once?
On October 19–20, Rhino Federated Computing is hosting the 2026 Federate AI Summit at the Omni Hotel in Boston's Seaport to bring the field's leading practitioners into one room.
What to Expect at the Summit
Nearly 200 attendees — including researchers, clinicians, pharma data scientists, regulators, cloud providers, and investors — will spend two days comparing deployments, pressure-testing approaches, and mapping where federated AI goes next. The program runs across four tracks: infrastructure and governance, enterprise use cases, emerging science, and the market and capital behind federated computing. Across all four, the sessions focus on what it takes to turn a successful pilot into a system organizations run every day.
Inside the Agenda: Four Challenges Between Pilot and Production
Attendees will hear from teams who have already worked through the challenges many organizations face as they move federated AI beyond the pilot stage.
How Institutions Govern Shared Models
Several sessions come from consortia already sharing models across institutional lines. Pharma data science leaders will unpack how the FAITE Consortium governs pre-competitive AI, and the PROBE Consortium will show how 39 partners arrived at one model. ICHOM and NIIMBL bring the view from learning collaboratives and biomanufacturing. Leaders from MSK, Fordham, Moffitt, and NCI will discuss the frameworks, model cards, and standards that let cancer centers train and share models.
How Federated Models Reach Clinics and Labs
Sessions from Argonne National Laboratory and genomics leaders at PacBio, Synthesize Bio, and Tempus trace federated methods from biobanks and fine-tuning to foundation models. Others take on multi-site real-world evidence, data harmonization, and new approaches to feature selection across heterogeneous data.
The Infrastructure That Powers Federation
Federated AI moves the hard problems from the model to the systems underneath it. Rhino Federated Computing's R&D team, NVIDIA, AWS, and Google Cloud will cover orchestration, cloud architecture, and federated agentic AI. A case study from Swissmedic will show how federated learning can support data-centric regulatory cooperation.
How Federated AI Scales Across Industries
Day two of the Summit widens the lens to aviation, energy, agriculture, satellite communications, manufacturing, and investment management. Investors and analysts will then look at how that cross-industry momentum is shaping the market for federated computing.
Three Questions on Industry Leaders' Minds
Three questions come up again and again in our conversations with teams deploying federated AI:
- Where does the cloud provider's role stop and the orchestration layer's begin?
- What separates a federated study from a federated system clinicians rely on every day?
- How will agentic AI change what organizations need from federated infrastructure?
We look forward to hearing how speakers and attendees approach each one, and to sharing what we learn once the summit wraps.
See You in Boston
Attending the Summit live? We look forward to seeing you there. To set aside time with our team during the summit, book a meeting here, or stop by the demo room on Monday, October 19th to see the Rhino FCP in action.
Not joining us in Boston? Register to attend virtually and join both days of sessions online. You can also follow Rhino Federated Cfomputing on LinkedIn for live coverage and our post-event insights on the conversations that shaped the summit.
