Fox River AI Workshop

You shouldn't have to drive to Chicago to find people building with AI. No traffic, cheaper drinks, and you're home by 9.

Fox River AI Workshop is an in-person artificial intelligence community for AI builders, developers, business owners, founders, and anyone experimenting with generative AI, LLMs, agents, automation, and practical AI applications in McHenry County and the Fox River Valley — Crystal Lake, Woodstock, Algonquin, Barrington, Elgin, and everywhere in between.

Come if you're shipping LLM applications, wiring up agents, automating your operations, or you run a business and want to see what's actually working — not what a vendor says is working.

The first few meetups are intentionally light. No demos, no presentations, no agenda to sit through. We're going to meet each other first, take a few minutes for everyone to say who they are and what they're working on or curious about, and then just talk. Once we've got a rhythm and know who's in the room, we'll add the good stuff — local companies sharing what they've actually deployed, and short lightning demos from members showing what they built.

What to expect:

6:30 — Arrive, grab a drink, settle in
7:00 — Quick go-around: name, what you do, what you're building or want to learn
7:15 — Open networking for the rest of the night

House rule: No pitching. Show what you built, not what you sell. That goes for the organizer too.

What to bring: Your curiosity, a problem you're stuck on, or something you're building. No laptop required — though nobody's stopping you from pulling something up over a beer.