Canada Cannot Regulate Its Way Into Industrial Leadership
Canada has spent a decade getting very good at reviewing projects and very bad at finishing them. I have watched capital groups arrive in Alberta with real money, real timelines and real intent, then leave because nobody could tell them who decides what, or when. This talk is about the distance between oversight and paralysis, and what it would take to rebuild the country's ability to execute large energy, compute and infrastructure projects without giving up public trust or responsible review.
Ideal audience
Government and regulators, major-project developers, industry associations
What you leave with
- Where approval processes actually break, and which delays are avoidable
- How international capital currently prices Canadian project risk
- A practical test for whether a process protects the public or only itself
AI Beyond the Pilot: Building Companies That Operate at Machine Speed
Most organizations bolted a chatbot onto a broken process and called it an AI strategy. I ran the other experiment. Over the past two years I rebuilt my own company's operations around agentic systems — project management, intelligence, marketing and event production — and rebuilt the cost base along with them. Some of it worked. Some failed in ways that were expensive and instructive. This talk covers what genuinely changes when a company is designed for machine speed, and where human judgment stays non-negotiable.
Ideal audience
Founders, operators, COOs and executive teams past the pilot stage
What you leave with
- Which functions truly redesign around agents, and which do not
- The failure modes that only surface at production scale
- A sequence for rebuilding operations without stopping the business
Energy Is Becoming Compute Infrastructure
Alberta spent a century learning to move energy. The next one will be about converting it into compute. The province has a real structural advantage here: baseload power, land, and operators who already know how to build infrastructure at scale. It also has real constraints — interconnection queues, policy uncertainty, and a public that has not been given a reason to care. This talk maps what must align across generation, grid, policy and capital, and where that alignment is currently failing.
Ideal audience
Energy operators, data-centre developers, investors, provincial and municipal government
What you leave with
- Why compute demand behaves unlike historical industrial load
- The specific bottlenecks between a signed LOI and an energized facility
- What a credible provincial compute position would actually require
Trust Is Economic Infrastructure
I have watched a major agreement begin as a conversation between two people who were introduced properly. I have also watched good deals die because the wrong person made the introduction. Relationships are not soft infrastructure — they set the speed at which capital, information and risk assessment move. This talk is about designing environments where senior people establish trust quickly, why most networking fails at exactly that, and how to tell whether a room produced anything worth counting.
Ideal audience
Investors, corporate development, economic development organizations, community and event builders
What you leave with
- What makes a room produce transactions instead of business cards
- How to qualify both sides of an introduction before making it
- Why attribution matters, and how to track it honestly
From Community to Market: Why Ecosystems Must Produce Outcomes
For years I measured community work by attendance. Then I helped build DataCon past fifteen hundred people and had to ask a harder question: what did any of it produce? This talk is about the moment that view changed — from participation metrics to companies, contracts, careers and projects. It is not an argument against community. It is an argument that mature communities owe their members outcomes, and that the people running them should be willing to be measured on it.
Ideal audience
Community builders, economic development organizations, association and chamber leadership
What you leave with
- The metrics that predict whether a community creates commercial value
- How to move a volunteer-driven community toward accountability without breaking it
- What to stop measuring entirely
Globalizing Alberta Without Losing What Makes It Alberta
Every trade mission risks becoming an export of talent. That is the wrong way to go global. Over the past year I have been building trade and investment relationships across Asia, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific against a single test: does this bring buyers, capital, knowledge or partners back into Alberta? This talk covers what international counterparts actually want from Canada, what they consistently misread about us, and how to structure relationships so expansion strengthens the home market.
Ideal audience
Trade organizations, government delegations, exporters, companies weighing international expansion
What you leave with
- What international buyers and capital groups look for in a Canadian counterpart
- How to structure a delegation so it produces follow-through
- The signals that an expansion is extracting value rather than returning it
Preparing Young People for Problems That Do Not Fit Inside a Classroom
At eight I had a paper route. At nineteen I was juggling several jobs, and a mentor showed me the difference between working for money and building leverage. That conversation redirected me more than any course did. Future Builders exists because high-agency young people develop fastest when they are placed next to credible operators and given consequential problems rather than simulations. This talk covers what access actually means, and what industry can offer that school structurally cannot.
Ideal audience
Educators, youth and accelerator programs, corporate social-impact leads, mentors
What you leave with
- Why access outperforms instruction for high-agency young people
- How to design mentorship that survives busy schedules
- What industry can offer that classrooms structurally cannot
