Starting with this issue, CODE Magazine partners with the Global AI Community. Over the coming months, you'll see their events show up in these pages more often. Before that happens, you should know who they are, how they work, and why a magazine about code decided to team up with a volunteer community. I can't claim neutrality here. Besides my job at CODE Magazine, I run the Houston chapter of Global AI, so a good part of what follows comes from my own experience.

Where It All Started

The Global AI Community operates as a non-profit foundation registered in the Netherlands. It held its first global event, the Global AI Bootcamp, on December 15, 2018: a one-day event in many cities at once, meant to give people their first real introduction to AI. In 2019, the community added the Global AI Night, which reached 76 communities in a single week that September, and the Bootcamp became the yearly anchor event it remains today.

In 2020, the pandemic pushed everything online, like it did for everybody else. The community ran a virtual tour and a virtual conference to keep chapters active, and in October 2021, “Global AI Back Together” marked the return to in-person meetings. That detail matters more than it seems. Plenty of tech communities never came back after 2020. This one did, and then it kept growing.

The website sums up the idea behind all of it in one line: the best way to learn AI is together. That can sound like a slogan, but it describes how the organization actually works. A central team creates content and shares it freely. Volunteers who know their city, their language, and their audience run the events locally.

Growth by the Numbers

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The last two years stand out. During 2025 alone, membership grew from about 89,000 to roughly 178,000. By the end of that year, 320 chapter leads ran 171 chapters in 69 countries and hosted 829 events between them. Since then, the community has added another 20 chapters and five more countries.

Numbers like these invite skimming, so let me put them another way. On almost any given week, a group of developers somewhere in the world sits in a room together (often a borrowed one, with pizza) and works through a hands-on lab on some AI topic. Nobody paid to get in, and the person at the front of the room does it on their own time.

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How a Chapter Works

A chapter functions as a local group, and anyone can start one for a city that does not have a chapter yet. The community provides a step-by-step guide and tools to help new organizers get their first event off the ground. Each chapter lead gets a Chapter Space on the Global AI platform to manage events, along with event templates, session content, and access to Azure credits.

The community also runs its own free digital badge system. Attendees can receive a verifiable badge for each event and can add it to their LinkedIn profile. In 2025, members earned 9,800 of them.

What the central organization doesn't do: tell chapters how to run their meetings. Some chapters meet monthly at a university. Others meet a few times a year at a company office. Some present in English, and many don't. That flexibility explains a lot of the growth.

The Houston Chapter

Our Houston chapter shows what the small end of the scale looks like. We meet in person every two to three months at CODE Magazine's headquarters. The format stays simple: people show up, we talk about what everyone builds right now, somebody presents, and usually everybody opens a laptop for a hands-on part. Topics have ranged from prompt engineering to real-world AI solutions to modernizing existing applications with AI.

What I've come to appreciate most: the mix of people. On a typical afternoon, we'll have senior architects, students, people whose manager just told them to “figure out this AI thing,” and a couple of folks who have built machine learning systems for years. Those groups rarely end up in the same room, and they learn a lot from each other.

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The Global Events

Local meetups form the backbone, but a few times a year the whole network does something together. These global events show the community's scale most clearly.

Global AI Bootcamp

The Bootcamp has run the longest. The 2025 edition took place in 161 locations worldwide, reached around 230,000 people, and drew about 10,000 in-person attendees, roughly 89 people per location. Another 40,000 joined virtually. For something volunteers organize almost entirely on their own, those numbers impress me.

AgentCon

In 2025, the community launched AgentCon, a series of free one-day conferences for developers who build with AI agents. The tour went from San Francisco to Singapore, covering 40 locations in 32 countries, and about 6,500 people attended in person. The sessions stay practical: demos, design patterns, deployment, and integration, presented by people who do this work in production.

AgentCamp 2026

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The series opened in India in February with Chennai, Coimbatore, and Gurugram. By March, it had spread to Goiania, Shanghai, Daegu, and Manila, three continents in a single month. April brought the most events, with stops in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Miami, Seoul, and Bogota. In May, events ran in Lagos, Luanda (Angola's first), Singapore, Sofia, and Bangkok, plus one in Mbarara, Uganda, well outside the usual tech hubs. On May 30 alone, seven events took place on the same day in Ghana, Peru, the United States, India, and Nigeria. Oslo closed the series on June 2.

Table 1 shows how the events spread across regions. Sixty-nine events ran in person, 25 ran virtually, and 10 used a hybrid format. Some drew big crowds; the Madrid stop at CEU San Pablo University had 408 attendees. Others brought a few dozen people into a classroom. Both count.

Every AgentCamp followed the same structure. It opened with a 15-minute global keynote, “Welcome to the era of the Agentic Enterprise,” hosted by Henk Boelman and Dona Sarkar with Lili Cheng, Dean Carignan, and Jay Parikh. That video has passed 37,000 views. Next came a 45-minute breakout on building and shipping agents with Microsoft Foundry and the AI Toolkit for VS Code, followed by one or more 90-minute hands-on workshops.

Every attendee received an Azure subscription through Azure for Education, so the labs ran against real cloud resources instead of screenshots. Attendees created 1,192 of those subscriptions over the course of the series. At the end of the day, everyone took home a certificate and a digital badge.

What AgentCamp Attendees Built

For CODE Magazine readers, the workshop content probably holds the most interest. Organizers picked from a catalog of six workshops, each designed to run for about 90 minutes on attendees' own laptops. Table 2 lists all six.

Local organizers also adapted the material. In Lagos, the pizza ordering agent turned into an agent for ordering Amala, a popular Nigerian dish.

More Than Events

Between events, the community publishes a steady stream of material.

Global AI Weekly

The Global AI Weekly newsletter arrives every Tuesday with a short roundup of the week in AI, curated by people who work in the field. In 2025, the team sent 52 issues, the subscriber count doubled to about 63,000, and close to a million emails reached inboxes over the year. You can subscribe at https://globalai.community/weekly.

What This Partnership Means for You

So why would a software development magazine partner with an AI community?

The short answer: the line between “AI people” and “developers” has pretty much disappeared. Most of you already build things that call a model, retrieve documents, or wire up tools for an agent, or you will within the year. That work raises developer questions. How do I test this? How do I deploy it? What happens when it fails? How do I keep the costs under control? Those questions belong in CODE Magazine, and they come up at every Global AI meetup I've attended.

The line between “AI people” and “developers” has pretty much disappeared.

The Global AI Community has something we don't: thousands of practitioners in the room, every week, working through these problems hands-on. We have something they can use: a long history of publishing deep, carefully edited technical content. Putting the two together makes sense.

In practice, you can expect articles from Global AI speakers and chapter leads, coverage of upcoming global events, and workshop material turned into articles you can follow at your desk.

How to Get Involved

If any of this sounds interesting, here's how to start:

1. Find a chapter near you at https://globalai.community/chapters. With 191 chapters worldwide, you have a decent chance of finding one within driving distance.
2. Subscribe to Global AI Weekly at https://globalai.community/weekly.
3. Offer to speak at an event. Chapters always look for speakers, and they welcome first-timers. If you've built something with AI and learned a thing or two along the way, you have a talk.
4. Start a chapter if your city doesn't have one yet. The community's documentation includes a step-by-step guide, and the central team will help you get your first event off the ground.
5. Watch for the next AgentCon and the next global event. They cost nothing, they happen locally, and they fill up.

And if you live anywhere near Houston, I'd love to see you at our next meeting. Bring a laptop.

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Global AI Community at a Glance

The Global AI Community counts 206,049 members in 191 local chapters across 74 countries. Those chapters have hosted more than 4,700 events, and 320 chapter leads ran the network at the end of 2025.

In 2026, AgentCamp alone reached 35 countries with 104 free events and about 8,900 attendees, who created 1,192 Azure subscriptions for the hands-on labs. The year before, AgentCon visited 40 locations in 32 countries. Learn more at https://globalai.community.

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