Hi @cultivate,
Thanks for the post.
In this use case, I would recommend you make use of a conditional block to check if there is any value from the get_field() and then run the query.
The code would look like so:
// get only first 3 results
if(get_field('conference_talks'){
$ids = get_field('conference_talks', false, false);
$query = new WP_Query(array(
'post_type' => 'conferences',
'posts_per_page' => 3,
'post__in' => $ids,
'post_status' => 'any',
'orderby' => 'rand',
));}