The Orsay Conference (1982) was the first to be labelled 'European Conference on AI' and had Yves Kodratoff as chair. The European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) was formally established on July 14, 1982, during the Constitutional Meeting held at the University of Paris-Sud, Campus d'Orsay. The first elected Board of ECCAI consisted of Wolfgang Bibel (Chair), Yves Kodratoff (Vice-Chair) and Stefano Cerri (Secretary).

Stefano Cerri organized the ECAI 1984 in Pisa, with Tim O’Shea as program chair. Back then, the 1984 ECAI edition was designated as the 'Sixth European Conference on AI,' considering the first conference in the series to be the 'Summer Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour,' held in Brighton in 1974 and organized by AISB (which has existed since 1964). Since then, the ECAI conferences have followed this numbering, which (somewhat) justifies considering 1974 as the first year of ECAI.

Retrospectively, the four conferences organised by AISB (from 1974 to 1980) can be roughly considered as "European Conferences on AI": Brighton (1974), Edinburgh (1976), Hamburg (1978) and Amsterdam (1980). It was in 1980, during the conference in Amsterdam (organised in collaboration with the Dutch organization NVKI), that Dennis de Champeaux agreed to act as coordinator to explore the possibility of setting up ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence).

From 1982 to 2022, every even-numbered year, ECCAI (now EurAI), jointly with one of the national member associations, organized a European Conference on AI (ECAI). From 2023 on, it became a yearly conference. The numbering has continued until the current 27th edition in 2024.

Following the traditional numbering of ECAI and the four first conferences on AI in Europe, the list of editions of the European Conferences on AI (ECAI) is:
1st ECAI: Brighton-1974
2nd ECAI: Edinburgh-1976
3rd ECAI: Hamburg-1978
4th ECAI: Amsterdam-1980
5th ECAI: Orsay-1982
6th ECAI: Pisa-1984
7th ECAI: Brighton-1986
8th ECAI: Munich-1988
9th ECAI: Stockholm-1990
10th ECAI: Vienna-1992
11th ECAI: Amsterdam-1994
12th ECAI: Budapest-1996
13th ECAI: Brighton-1998
14th ECAI: Berlin-2000
15th ECAI: Lyon-2002
16th ECAI: Valencia-2004
17th ECAI: Riva del Garda-2006
18th ECAI: Patras-2008
19th ECAI: Lisboa-2010
20th ECAI: Montpellier-2012
21st ECAI: Prague-2014
22nd ECAI: The Hague-2016
23rd ECAI: Stockholm-2018 (jointly with IJCAI)
24th ECAI: Santiago de Compostela (online)-2020
25th ECAI: Vienna-2022 (jointly with IJCAI)
26th ECAI: Krakow-2023
27th ECAI: Santiago de Compostela-2024

The ECAI proceedings are available here.