This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Applied Cognitive Computing, ACC 2024, and the 26th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ICAI 2024, held as part of the 2024 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Applied Computing, in Las Vegas, USA, during July 22 to July 25, 2024. This proceedings book includes 9 papers from ACC 2024 and 31 papers from ICAI 2024. They have been organized in topical sections as follows: Applied cognitive computing and artificial intelligence; artificial intelligence and applications; artificial intelligence: reinforcement learning and knowledge engineering; and artificial intelligence: optimization methods and machine learning. .