AI events in Victoria, BC

Anu’s take

Two full days on clean, trustworthy data, if that's your job. Their website lists two different Vancouver hotels for the venue, so check the address with them before you book. And a heads up: their logo still says sixth annual, but this is the seventh, so I took that line off the picture on this card.

Anu’s take

Can't wait to co-host this event with Gabriel. This Claude community event is for everyone who has, currently or is thinking about using Claude. Most excited about seeing what people have built with Claude.

Anu’s take

Connor was a very early adopter of AI-assisted coding, and has built an AI-assisted coding product that integrates with Linear. He's not out in public that often so grab the opportunity to be in a room with a local doer in the tech industry. Bummed I can't make it.

Anu’s take

David was on this stage in March explaining what going AI-native means. He is back with the part that comes after the idea: where all that agent output actually lives. He is on a roll, and I suspect he is quickly becoming a regular on the Victoria speaking circuit.

Anu’s take

If you lead engineers, this one's worth your Monday evening. I treat AI as a confident first drafter that gets you most of the way there, and the rest still takes someone who knows what good looks like. You may not leave with answers, but you'll likely find others working through the same questions. If you think you fit the bill and want to be in the room, contact Rob Bennett and let him know you… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

If you've read The Alignment Problem, this is a chance to hear Brian Christian work through it in person. I use AI every day, and I still believe it's no substitute for professional judgment. Who decides what these systems should value is a question for all of us, so bring yours.

Anu’s take

This is going to be a good one. So looking forward to joining my fellow Victoria Data Society board members in bringing this event to Victoria. It's well overdue, and think of it as primer leading up to the Prompt Victoria AI conference in November.

Anu’s take

A skill used to mean something a person spent years acquiring. Now it is a folder of plain text that runs the same on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. The last time I was on a panel in this room, the question was which platform to back. This is the first answer I have seen that holds whichever one you pick.

Anu’s take

A Vancouver series has put exactly one night on the board in Victoria, and Early Bird has already sold out. Bazett did his own undergrad at UVic, went off to Toronto and Cincinnati, and came back here to teach. More than 600,000 people now watch him explain this material on YouTube. Forty-five minutes, then the floor opens.

Anu’s take

Matthew is based out of Austin, so catch him in person while you can. He has a very firm grasp on this, and he eats his own dog food: fourteen open patent families, some of them his, and a recent one he deliberately ran the way he tells clients to, thirty thousand words of transcripts and images handed to a drafting attorney with no restrictions on the AI. Most guidance on this subject arrives… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

Good to see AOT on the Tech Week bill, and it is not the first time they have turned up on a local programme this year: two of their people were on the Data Day speaker list back in June. The case for the afternoon is that this is a shop with a product of its own, formsflow.ai, built and maintained in the open, so the three sessions come from people who have to keep something running rather than… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

Go for the site as much as the occasion. Cement production here exhausted the limestone in 1912, and Jennie Butchart started hauling topsoil into the emptied quarry next door, which is now the Sunken Garden people queue for. A fundraiser to restore the half nobody turned into a garden is a considerably better premise than the usual room with a bar.

Anu’s take

Fifty seats, approval required, and a guest list aimed at the people who actually decide how their organisations change. The agenda is the unglamorous half of AI: what to hold onto, what to unlearn, how to bring people along. In my experience that last one is where it quietly stalls.

Anu’s take

Did someone say AI governance? Right up my alley. The part I want to see is the example he picked. It is a real community project, not a made-up one, and it belongs to a group that sits right beside his own company. Both of them have already published where the line falls between the community work and the paid work. Testing your own rules against that is harder than talking about them.

Anu’s take

The useful thing about this one is who is on the panel: four founders in their twenties, on what they have actually got AI doing, rather than another room of Gen Xers forecasting what it will do next. The billing is what is running, what it took to get working, and where a person is still required. Owen has also published a list of what they still need, down to a mic and someone on the door, which… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

Their own site publishes numbers, not just a commitment: dollars distributed, projects funded, youth supported. Publishing a number is a harder commitment than a statement of intent, and pre-launch is the moment to ask what it looks like at scale.

Anu’s take

'Physical AI' is this year's headline term, and right now it stretches to cover almost anything. What makes this hour useful is the vantage point. ROK counts the stack from bare metal up. Firmware first, then the controls a person actually touches, and only then anything with a browser in it. Ask that room where AI belongs in a device and you get an engineering answer rather than a trend line.

Anu’s take

The listing does not mention that this is one stop on a run that has already been through Tel Aviv and Shenzhen. Victoria is on that list because Alhwyn and Jia Ming put it on, one based here and one who runs the Calgary and Toronto rooms. Neither is doing this for the first time, which is the main reason to bother.

Anu’s take

This is a topic that needs a lot more attention than it is currently getting, so it is good to see it start bubbling up to the top. The interesting part is who is delivering it: a Meta-certified trainer is the one calling this the awkward teenage phase. I do wonder what Cory Doctorow would make of that, since an advertiser losing visibility and control is stage three of Enshittification almost to… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

The question on this agenda with actual teeth is what gets disclosed to clients and what does not. Everyone billing for marketing work has settled that one quietly by now, project by project, and almost nobody says their answer out loud with competitors in the room. Ross Dunn has been broadcasting about search since 2009, on what is still the longest-running SEO podcast going, so he has watched… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

René has been in the agentic coding space longer than most, and he spoke at Prompt last year. Him moving back to Calgary was Victoria's loss. Happy to have him here as often as we can get him, so get him while he is here, before he makes like a pumpkin and heads back over the mountains.

Anu’s take

Pretty much every story this year about an agent going rogue turns out, on inspection, to be a story about permissions. Not the model misbehaving: a key left somewhere convenient, a token scoped to everything, an approval step nobody added. A talk that spends its time on access architecture rather than prompt craft is aimed at the right half of the problem.

Anu’s take

The first one was excellent, and it came with more pizza than the room could physically get through. My Mona the Octocat plush sits on my desk. The second reads like more of the same, which is the compliment rather than the complaint. I can't make this one.

Anu’s take

Go for the floor, not the stages. Two of the four are streamed and recorded, so the headline talks reach you at home for a fraction of what the trip costs, and what does not travel is the exhibition hall, the other two stages and whoever you end up standing next to. Worth doing that arithmetic before booking anything.

Anu’s take

Rachel is one of the earlier faces in Victoria's AI scene, which means she is talking from a couple of years of the actual work rather than from this month's news cycle. The last time we shared a stage here, four of us spent it debating which platform wins. She has the room to herself this time, and her premise is that the call should not default to the loudest technical voice. Guilty, and worth… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

A full day of Microsoft 365, Copilot and AI sessions across three tracks. Last year's debut sold out and I'd expect this one to as well. The quiet reminder underneath all of it: most of the Copilot features on stage are already sitting inside licences people pay for every month and have never opened. A summit like this earns its keep if the room goes home and finally turns the thing on.

Anu’s take

Jonathan's checkers program did not just take the world title and a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, it went on to solve the game outright: perfect play is a draw, and that is that. Games have been AI's proving ground ever since, from Chinook to the chatbots writing everyone's emails, with a detour through Halo, whose AI sidekick Cortana later turned up on Microsoft's payroll. A lunch… The rest is on its page.

Anu’s take

This one's going to be epic. I was at last year's, about 60 people showed, and the winner, Calum Bird, built an app that connected to his bank account and an SMS service to track his spending and text him a burn whenever he made a bad call. The poorer the spending decision, the bigger the burn. It was brilliant.

Anu’s take

Every stakeholder alignment exercise I have been part of produced a wall of sticky notes and a promise to synthesize them later. Later is usually never. Here the synthesis happens in the room, in seconds, and the humans keep the judgement calls. That is the version of AI I can get behind.

Anu’s take

AI turned up in classrooms a good while before anyone wrote the rules for it, which is roughly how these things always go. This session steps back from the panic to ask what it actually means for students, parents, and the people who will eventually be hiring them. A lunch spent on a genuinely hard question, which beats another one spent pretending it isn't one.

Anu’s take

Microsoft spent years letting somebody else's lab be its AI story. There are seven models with its own name on them now, and the launch post makes a point of saying they were trained from scratch with nothing distilled from another lab. That is a sentence you only write when people have been asking, so I would rather hear the team that built them talk through it than read it again.

Anu’s take

Quantum is probably going to be what overshadows AI in the buzzword and craze category. I can't get enough of it right now.

Anu’s take

Feels like we optimized for connection and accidentally optimized out the humans. Curious if we can design AI that nudges us back toward each other instead of just making us more efficient at being alone.

Anu’s take

Video is where it's at this year. Well, that's what TikTok told me.

Anu’s take

Data and AI oh my!

Anu’s take

GPT-2. What is that?

Anu’s take

Jamie is a Gem. Nuff said!

Anu’s take

$100 discount code for VDS members. DM me to get it. This is going to be epic. Plus I'm there as well. It's not often that an Anthropic Claude Certified Architect rolls into town. Let alone one putting on a workshop for the general public.

Anu’s take

Avatars? This is going to be interesting.

Anu’s take

Jeremy Moseley in the house. Fresh off of Microsoft Build. What else might we hear about?

Anu’s take

I can guarantee there will be a number of game changing announcements. Peter Steinberger, creator of the OpenClaw AI agent system, as a featured speaker. Enough said.

Anu’s take

Veilstream has found a way to make data masking easy and fun!

Anu’s take

Curious about AI personas?

Anu’s take

Ah, if you don't know about this conference. Do you exist?

Anu’s take

AI hmmm. I might know a thing or two about this. Maybe three or four.

Anu’s take

In partnership with Redbrick.

Anu’s take

To be or not to be. What is AI?

Anu’s take

AI-native eh! What does that mean?

Anu’s take

The perfect time and place to see local Microsoft advocate Anu (Me) go head to head with three other multi-disciplinary genAI experts. Guaranteed to see Steve and I butt heads.

Anu’s take

Data and dating? Is dataing a word. What does it mean if I live by a bagel shop.

Anu’s take

I'm a little biased on this one, as wait for it. I'm the one presenting.

Anu’s take

Hear directly from Jesse about why the RUH AI platform should be the platform to run your digital workforce on.

Anu’s take

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