When I started my PhD in CS/AI in the late 90s, my department's AI faculty was already telling us, "at the major conferences, all the action is in the workshops

When I started my PhD in CS/AI in the late 90s, my department's AI faculty was already telling us, "at the major conferences, all the action is in the workshops." And this was my experience, the workshops were indeed where you found the most engaging experiences and interesting new things. Meanwhile the work at the main at the main conference of AAAI or ICML was much farther along, and the value of having it presented at a conference, rather than a journal, was minimal. The conventional wisdom was, "the talk is just an advertisement for the paper."