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We Built an AI-Powered SXSW Planner (So You Don't Have to Drown in 10,000 Events)

Aerial view of Austin during SXSW festival

SXSW is incredible. It's also completely overwhelming.

9 days. 450+ official sessions across 23 tracks. Over 1,000 showcasing artists. 130+ film screenings. Hundreds of unofficial parties, pop-ups, and activations. 345,000+ attendees all trying to figure out the same thing: what should I actually go to?

We've been there. You open the schedule app, see 47 events happening at the same time, and freeze. You hear about an amazing showcase after it already happened. You spend 30 minutes scrolling through options and end up at a mediocre panel because it was the closest venue.

So we built something to fix it.

What we built

We created a semantic AI search engine that knows about every SXSW 2026 event — official conference sessions, music showcases, film screenings, EDU events, and unofficial parties and activations.

Here's what's under the hood:

  • Data collection — We scraped and structured every event from the official SXSW schedule plus unofficial event trackers, including speaker bios, company profiles, venues, dates, times, and descriptions.
  • Vector store — All events are embedded and stored in Qdrant, enabling semantic search. Ask for "AI in healthcare" and it finds relevant panels even if they don't use those exact words.
  • APIs on Cloudflare — Our search APIs run on Cloudflare Workers with AI Gateway for intelligent routing and caching.
  • MCP server — We exposed the whole thing as a Model Context Protocol server, so any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.) can search SXSW events, look up speakers, and build itineraries conversationally.

Try it yourself: Point any MCP-compatible client at:

https://sxsw-mcp.jd-ad0.workers.dev/mcp

You get four tools: sxsw_search (semantic search with filters for dates, tracks, venues, event types), sxsw_get_speaker (full speaker profiles with all their events), sxsw_get_company (company profiles with all speakers and events), and sxsw_get_filters (discover all available filter values).

The proof: 3 curated itineraries

To show what this can do, we asked our MCP to build three very different SXSW days. Each one targets a specific type of attendee and pulls from real events in the database.

1. The AI Explorer

For the tech entrepreneur, startup founder, or anyone who wants to understand where AI is actually heading.

Futuristic AI conference with holographic displays

Date: Monday, March 16, 2026

Time Event Venue
10:00 AM Intro to Vibe Coding: Build Without Code — Hands-on workshop with Vercel's v0 team. Build a working app using natural language. No coding experience needed. Courtyard Marriott
11:30 AM How to Design a Company That AI Can't Outpace — Ian Beacraft (Signal & Cipher) on why your org chart is the bottleneck, not your AI tools. Hilton Austin Downtown
12:30 PM Lunch break — explore the Trade Show floor —
2:30 PM The Internet of Value Meets the Internet of Intelligence — What happens when AI agents can hold, send, and earn money. With Circle's CTO and Operator Collective. JW Marriott
4:00 PM AI at the Speed of Life: Drug Discovery and Delivery — Eli Lilly's CIDO on deploying AI at scale in pharma, where the stakes are life and death. JW Marriott
4:30 PM AI Builders Meet Up — Casual networking with founders, engineers, and researchers building AI products. Convert the day's inspiration into connections. JW Marriott

The arc: Hands-on building → strategic transformation → frontier tech → real-world impact → community. You leave with a prototype, a new mental model, and a handful of new contacts.

Also on the radar: Earlier in the weekend, catch Mark Cuban's fireside chat "Can Media Survive AI?" (March 14), Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on "The Internet After Search" (March 14), and a Google DeepMind hands-on workshop on generative media (March 14).

2. The Music Discovery Crawl

For the music fan who wants to genre-hop from a K-pop strategy session to a TDE showcase to Berlin techno — all in one day.

Live music venue in Austin at night with neon lights

Date: Monday, March 16, 2026

Time Event Venue
10:00 AM The Future of Live Music: Immersive and Interactive — Meta, Epic Games, Wave, and Magnopus on XR concerts and virtual performance. Downright Austin
2:30 PM K-Pop's Global Domination: Data Behind the Hits — HYBE (BTS's label), Virgin Music, and Luminate reveal the superfan strategy reshaping the industry. Downright Austin
~4:00 PM SUUVI — A Cuban-Chinese composer who toured as Hans Zimmer's solo cellist, now making avant-garde electronic-classical fusion. Only-at-SXSW discovery. Flamingo Cantina
~5:00 PM Jamie Duffy — Irish artist whose debut outsold every Irish debut since Hozier. 135M+ Spotify streams. Catch him in an intimate room before he fills arenas. Flamingo Cantina
7:30 PM Top Dawg Entertainment Showcase — The label that broke Kendrick Lamar brings Ray Vaughn and Devin Malik to Antone's. Get there early. Antone's
~10:30 PM The Rendezvous in ATX — Free, no-badge party spanning R&B, Afrobeat, Jazz, Funk, and House. Nine acts. The real Austin. Sahara Lounge
~11:30 PM Modeselektor @ German Haus Finale — Berlin electronic legends close out the five-day German Music Export program. Dance until 12:30 AM. Speakeasy

The arc: Industry insight → data strategy → classical-electronic fusion → viral folk → hip-hop → Afrobeat soul → Berlin techno. Seven genres, six venues, one unforgettable day.

Pro tip: The Rendezvous at Sahara Lounge is free with no badge required. Sahara Lounge is in East Austin — plan a 10-minute rideshare from downtown.

3. The First-Timer's Best Of

For the person who has never been to SXSW and wants a taste of everything: tech, startups, film, music, food, and nightlife.

First-time visitor exploring a bustling festival with art and food

Date: Saturday, March 14, 2026

Time Event Venue
10:00 AM Startup Pitch: Intelligent Systems & Robotics — Five startups pitch AI, AR/VR, and robotics to top VCs. Shark Tank energy, live. JW Marriott
11:30 AM "The Internet After Search" — Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) — AI is breaking the economic model of the web. Prince sees 20% of all internet traffic; his perspective is unmatched. JW Marriott
12:30 PM International Innovations Expo — Free, open to the public. Demo unreleased tech, talk to founders from around the world. Wander and discover. Fairmont
2:30 PM The Future of Music is Participatory — BandLab, Sony, and artist 310babii on how fans are becoming creators. The panel that bridges SXSW's tech and music souls. Downright Austin
4:00 PM A Conversation with Garry Tan (Y Combinator) — Unscripted conversation with the person who decides which startups YC backs. JW Marriott
5:15 PM Film: "The Peril at Pincer Point" — Quirky supernatural thriller at the Alamo Drafthouse. Food and drinks served during the screening. Alamo Lamar
6:30 PM SXSW Pitch Award Ceremony — Co-hosted by Garry Tan (YC) and Josephine Chen (Sequoia). Watch founders learn they've won in real time. Electric energy. JW Marriott
7:00 PM Redbreast Unhidden Bar — Exclusive pop-up whiskey experience. The perfect SXSW nightcap. 21+, pre-registration required. Powder Room

The arc: Startups → tech keynote → hands-on expo → music/culture → VC insight → indie film → award show → craft cocktails. Eight experiences across six categories. This is the day that makes you come back next year.

Why Saturday: The Innovations Expo is only free to the public on this day. The Pitch Award Ceremony — one of SXSW's signature moments — happens this evening. And March 14 is the sweet spot: programming is in full swing but before end-of-week fatigue.

Build your own

These three itineraries barely scratch the surface. The MCP has data on every event — panels, workshops, keynotes, showcases, screenings, parties, meetups, and activations across 80+ venues and 55 tracks.

Connect your AI assistant to the MCP and ask it anything:

  • "Find me networking events for healthcare founders on March 15"
  • "What's happening at Antone's this week?"
  • "Build me a day focused on sustainability and climate tech"
  • "Who are the most interesting speakers from Google?"
  • "What unofficial parties don't require a badge?"
https://sxsw-mcp.jd-ad0.workers.dev/mcp

Works with Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client. Just add the URL as a remote MCP server and start asking.

How we built it (the nerdy details)

For the technically curious:

  1. Scraping & structuring — Collected event data from the official SXSW API, schedule pages, and unofficial event aggregators. Normalized everything into a unified schema: events, speakers, companies, venues.
  2. Embeddings & vector search — Generated embeddings for every event, speaker, and company. Stored them in Qdrant for semantic similarity search with metadata filtering.
  3. Cloudflare Workers + AI Gateway — Built the search API as a Cloudflare Worker. AI Gateway handles model routing, caching, and rate limiting.
  4. MCP server — Wrapped the API in Model Context Protocol format, also running on Cloudflare Workers. Four tools: search, speaker lookup, company lookup, and filter discovery.

The entire stack runs on Cloudflare's edge network, so queries resolve fast from anywhere in the world.

Have a messy data problem you want to turn into something useful? Chat with us — this is exactly the kind of thing we love building.