AI Events in Fort Wayne | AI Tinkerers Meetups 2026

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne - AI Meetups, Events, and Builder Demos 2026

A promotional banner for an AI Tinkerers meetup in Fort Wayne, displayed in a frame on a classic stone building wall.. Text: AI Tinkerers
Fort Wayne
Meetup - May 16
May 16 10:00 AM
Meetup
21 days ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne: May 2026 Meetup

Saturday, May 16th 10AM
Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller Austin Luke Athar Safdar MS, MBA, PMP, ChemE, PSM II, ACP, ΦΚΦ Rob Schleinkofer Art McCoy Rushikesh Borude David Stillson

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne held a code-first meetup for active builders to share technical demos and knowledge.

A promotional banner for the 'AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne' group, featuring event details overlaid on a green circuit board graphic above a photo of attendees and a presenter in a modern meeting room.. Text: AI TINKERERS FORT WAYNE Feb 21, 2026 10:00 AM AI TINKERERS - FORT WAYNE
Meetup
3 months ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne: February 2026 Meetup

Saturday, February 21st 10AM to 12PM
Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller Emma Lytle Conner Wheeler Philip Gerken Austin Luke David Stillson Art McCoy Conner Call
+130

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne gathered builders for a code-first deep dive into AI projects. They sought technical demos and offered partnership opportunities to brands supporting the community.

A promotional banner for an event called 'AI Tinkerers - Fort Wayne,' featuring event details overlaid on a 3D rendered background of a dark, industrial loft interior with exposed brick and futuristic holographic screens.. Text: AI Tinkerers - Fort Wayne November 18th 6:30 PM AI TINKERERS - FORT WAYNE
Meetup
7 months ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne November 2025 Meetup

Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 6:30PM
Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller Senay Yakut Austin Luke Charmaine Quinn Art McCoy David Stillson Philip Gerken Athar Safdar MS, MBA, PMP, ChemE, PSM II, ACP, ΦΚΦ Bryan Jones

Practitioners gathered for an in-person evening of collaboration, troubleshooting, and demos focused on active building with large language models and machine learning.

A horizontal banner displaying the text "AI TINKERERS - FORT WAYNE" in bold, rounded dark blue letters with a prominent white outline, set against a blurred gradient background that transitions from dark blue on the left to dark green on the right.
Meetup
10 months ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne August 2025 Meetup

Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 6:30PM
Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller Amber Schleinkofer Nate A Ross Alyssa LaVeck Athar Safdar MS, MBA, PMP, ChemE, PSM II, ACP, ΦΚΦ Chase Likes Philip Gerken Robert Kinney

Technical practitioners gathered for an in-person meetup focused on practical advice for AI policies, machine learning data, and generative systems. The structured evening included Q&A, short presentations, and a featured speaker.

The image is a digitally manipulated photo advertising an 'AI Tinkerers Meetup' on May 19th, featuring people watching a screen with a man in a suit and a burger.. Text: AI Tinkerers Meetup
Hands-On Al Projects
May 19, 6:30PM-8:30PM EDT
AI TINKERERS FORT WAYNE
Meetup
about 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne May 2025 Meetup

Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Chuck Knox Amber Schleinkofer Igor Nikitin JOSHUA DINGUS Athar Safdar MS, MBA, PMP, ChemE, PSM II, ACP, ΦΚΦ

The practitioner-led forum focused on LLMs and generative AI brought together technical builders to share work, seek concrete help, and discuss engineering challenges.

This image is a banner advertising an AI Tinkerers meet-up in Fort Wayne. It provides details about the date, time, and location of the event.. Text: AI Tinkerers
Fort Wayne April Meet-up
At the Forum on the Electric Works Campus
April 15th 2025 (Tax Day)
6:30-8:30 pm
Come Learn • Teach • Present
Meetup
about 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne Tax Day Meetup

Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Chuck Knox Amber Schleinkofer Valerie McKain Igor Nikitin Philip Gerken Louinord Innocent Rob Schleinkofer Nate A Ross

Attendees gathered for an in-person community event focused on sharing AI projects, troubleshooting, and networking among local builders and researchers.

A banner advertising a meetup for AI Tinkerers in Fort Wayne.. Text: AI TINKERERS
FORT WAYNE
11/19/2024 MEETUP
6:30-8:30 PM
THE FORUM AT ELECTRIC WORKS
LEARN, TEACH, PRESENT
Meetup
over 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne November 19th 2024 Meetup

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Chuck Knox Jon Fazzaro Philip Gerken

The in-person gathering focused on sharing practical applications and troubleshooting for Google's Notebook LM among artificial intelligence and machine learning practitioners.

A banner advertising an AI Tinkerers meetup in Fort Wayne on October 15, 2024, at The Forum at Electric Works.. Text: AI TINKERERS
FORT WAYNE
10/15/2024 MEETUP
THE FORUM AT ELECTRIC WORKS
LEARN, TEACH, PRESENT
Meetup
over 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne October 15th 2024 Meetup

Tuesday, October 15th, 2024 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Kai Blakeborough Chuck Knox Rob Schleinkofer Neha Pathak Jon Fazzaro Samiya Qasmi Athar Safdar MS, MBA, PMP, ChemE, PSM II, ACP, ΦΚΦ Neha Pathak Jim Dettmer Philip Gerken Charmaine Quinn

Practitioners gathered for hands-on AI collaboration, trading technical advice, sharing projects, and engaging in group problem-solving and presentations.

A banner advertising an AI Tinkerers meetup in Fort Wayne on September 17, 2024, at The Forum at Electric Works.. Text: AI TINKERERS
FORT WAYNE
9/17/2024 MEETUP
THE FORUM AT ELECTRIC WORKS
6:30 - 8:30 PM
LEARN, TEACH, PRESENT
Meetup
over 1 year ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne September 17th 2024 Meetup

Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 6:30PM to 8:30PM
Lindsay Lott Rob Schleinkofer Daniel Reese Philip Gerken Jon Fazzaro Adam Lobdell Paul Pennell

Practitioners gathered for hands-on collaboration, troubleshooting, and demo-driven learning focused on building machine learning systems. The event featured an open floor for problems, demonstrations, and a featured speaker.

A banner advertising a meetup for AI Tinkerers in Fort Wayne on August 20, 2024.. Text: AI TINKERERS
FORT WAYNE
8/20/2024 MEETUP
SWIZZLE MARKET 6:30 - 8:00 PM
LEARN, TEACH, PRESENT
Meetup
almost 2 years ago

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne August 20th 2024 Meet up

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024 6:30PM
Kai Blakeborough JOSHUA DINGUS Amber Schleinkofer Rob Schleinkofer Angie Carel Adam Lobdell Lindsay Lott Christer Watson Charmaine Quinn Steve Franks Chris Lomont Jon Fazzaro Paul Pennell Philip Gerken

The AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne community met for technical discussion, project demonstrations, and peer networking focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning advancements. Sponsor support was appreciated for the event.

Meet the Organizers

Chuck Knox Nathan Sawmiller

Best AI meetup in Fort Wayne for builders

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne is a hands-on AI builder meetup with live demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking.

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne is built for engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Each meetup centers on real projects from local builders: working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and practical demos rather than sales talks or general AI lectures.

The Fort Wayne chapter is part of a 231-city global network with 110,000+ members, making AI Tinkerers the world's largest hands-on AI builder community. Members include AI engineers, ML researchers, developers, founders, and builders from the local Fort Wayne chapter.

A typical AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne meetup runs about three hours with live demos from local builders, technical Q&A, and networking. Demos are expected to show real systems or code, not sales decks. Check the upcoming events listed above for the next scheduled meetup. Most AI Tinkerers chapters run monthly, but frequency varies by city. Subscribe to the Fort Wayne chapter to get notified.

Local cadence
4 recent events
Format
Live demos, technical Q&A, no sales pitches
Audience
Screened AI builders, founders, researchers, and engineers

Best AI meetup in Fort Wayne for hands-on builders

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne is the best AI meetup in Fort Wayne for hands-on builders who want live code demos, technical discussion, and no-pitch networking. The Fort Wayne chapter hosts in-person events for engineers, founders, researchers, and product builders working on AI agents, multimodal and voice interfaces, RAG and knowledge systems, AI coding tools, workflow automation, evals, observability, and production AI infrastructure. Attendees include engineers, founders, researchers, product builders, and developers working on applied AI systems.

What makes AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne different from other AI meetups?

AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne is screened, demo-first, and no-pitch. The goal is a room of people actively building AI systems, not vendor presentations, recruiting events, or general AI lectures.

Builder-only room

Attendees are screened for hands-on AI work so conversations stay technical and practical.

Live technical demos

Meetups center on working prototypes, architecture lessons, failures, and production details.

Global builder network

The Fort Wayne chapter is part of a 231-city network with 110,000+ members worldwide.

Topics at AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne

deck

Deck is a local development environment manager that uses Docker to spin up reproducible, cloud-synced workspaces in seconds.

Grok3

xAI's frontier model trained on the 100,000-GPU Colossus cluster to dominate reasoning and real-time data synthesis.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is the definitive word processing application (first released in 1983) for creating, editing, and sharing professional text documents with a standard .docx file format.

Notebook LM

An AI-powered research assistant from Google that uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to ground insights in your specific documents.

PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF): The universal, fixed-layout file format ensuring document fidelity across all operating systems and devices.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is the industry-standard presentation platform: build, collaborate on, and deliver high-impact visual narratives with Microsoft 365 integration.

text

Text technology (NLP) processes and interprets human language data, enabling applications like sentiment analysis, machine translation, and advanced content classification.

Recent talks at AI Tinkerers Fort Wayne

Chuck Knox
Notebook LM: AI Slide Decks
Feb 21
Creating a slide Deck in Power Point has always taken a large amount of time. Using Word as the basis for a talk, Grok to add d...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Microsoft Word Grok3
Chuck Knox
Google Earth Engine: Downloading LiDAR
Aug 19
I will be presenting a plugin for Google Earth Engine that automatically downloads lidar data and creates a digital elevation m...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Google Earth Engine Claude
Nate A Ross
OpenAI Real-Time Voice Agents
Aug 19
Live coding demonstration showing how to build real-time voice conversations with AI using LiveKit's WebRTC infrastructure and ...
Nate A Ross Fort Wayne
GPT-4 OpenAI Realtime API
Igor Nikitin
ChatGPT Feasibility for Financial Modeling
May 20
Is it feasible to replace current financial models used in the insurance industry with a ChatGPT style chat that takes insuranc...
Igor Nikitin Fort Wayne
ChatGPT
Chuck Knox
ML Finds Stable CO₂ Injection Sites
Apr 15
Many ethanol plants are struggling with complex subsurface conditions when evaluating sites for the injection of carbon dioxide...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
Google Earth Engine Sentinel-2
Chuck Knox
Lidar Processing for Machine Learning
Oct 15
Lidar is a pulsed laser scan of the surface of the Earth. Billions of points contain accurate X,Y and Z coordinates. This dense...
Chuck Knox Fort Wayne
LiDAR Point Cloud
Rob Schleinkofer
MITRE ATLAS Local LLM Security
Oct 15
Security resources will be shared and attendees will gain insights into the MITRE ATLAS™ AI security framework and explore prac...
Rob Schleinkofer Fort Wayne
LangChain Ollama
JOSHUA DINGUS
Aider: AI Pair Programming
Aug 20
Meet Aider —an open-source tool that's redefining how developers work with large codebases. Aider seamlessly integrates with Gi...
JOSHUA DINGUS Fort Wayne
GPT-4o Claude
Jon Fazzaro
Don't Generate, Renovate
Jul 16
The real cost of software engineering is not creating new code, but changing existing code. It's right there in the name—softwa...
Jon Fazzaro Fort Wayne
Eli T. Drumm
WGPT
Feb 29
The goal is to create a completely AI-generated radio station, where the metadata, album art, and music are all generated from ...
Eli T. Drumm Fort Wayne
Kai Blakeborough
SmartSummary: A CustomGPT
Feb 29
SmartSummary is a specialized version of ChatGPT designed to provide high-quality, abstract-style summaries and outlines of use...
Kai Blakeborough Fort Wayne
ChatGPT
Doug Wallstrom
Ask Wayne
Jan 25
At Interplay we created a Custom GPT to help discover all the great places to enjoy on an evening out in Fort Wayne. A night of...
Doug Wallstrom Fort Wayne
Custom GPT Google Search

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Last updated: June 2026