The short version: I started day three with my neck out, published "Sovereign AI for Whom?", a critical piece on the federal data centre announcement, my name and face on it, and spent the rest of the day finding out it was the right call.
Chike Okwara from Eth??s Lab walked up to thank me before I'd finished my coffee. The floor had pivoted from last year's "spy AI" to this year's "humanizing AI."
I ran renegade booths with Sam Matthews, sat in on press conferences with Chris Smalls, Hasan Piker, and BC Green Party leader Emily Loewen, and got my brain bent by Lars Leckie on the "blast radius of AI."
What set me off wasn't the centres. It was the process. A two-week online Q&A with the federal purpose buried in it. A downtown site with no public file at all. Land acknowledgments on a stage instead of named Nations on a contract. That's not consultation. That's permitting.
So I wrote it: five plain asks before the MOU gets signed. Independent environmental assessments. A public allocation policy that reserves compute for academic, civic, and Indigenous use. Community benefits agreements with real signatures. Indigenous governance on host-Nation terms. A creator-rights budget line.
And then I felt it, economically exposed, my name and face on a critique of the exact people I'm trying to build with. But the frame held. Minister Evan Solomon wants to sort everyone into cheerleaders (pompoms) or stop-builders (pitchforks). I'm neither. I'm not calling anyone out. I'm calling us all in. Team Receipt: both hands full. One full of curiosity and the other full of critique. One building, one holding the ethics.
Meanwhile, we were running the soul of it
Here's the both/and: while Web Summit ran the trade-show floor, BC + AI ran the soul of it. Three events this week. Except I'd argued the week before, in Web Summit Vancouver 2026 on my site, that these aren't "side events" at all. They're civic infrastructure, how a city metabolizes a global event instead of renting itself out to one.
The Mind, AI & Consciousness night at Parker Street Studios, with Suzanne Gildert showing her art and talking quantum consciousness, Fiann and Loki Jorgensen on the mic, me on the front door making sure everybody got in and felt welcome. AI Film Club still to come.
That same piece asked the question nobody at a conference wants asked: who's actually counting?
The 2026 homepage says 20,000+ attendees. There's $14.8 million in public money behind the three-year deal. And days before the doors opened, the visible app directory was closer to 5,600 profiles.
I'm not saying the event is fake. The people are real, the energy is real. I'm saying show us the badge math. I asked publicly, I heard back from the press team, and I'm still chasing the real reconciliation. We are not scenery. We are the ecosystem.
I'm inside the conference and I'm building the thing around it. That's not a contradiction. That's the job.
Chike, before coffee
I hadn't even posted up yet when Chike walked over. Mentor and advisor at Eth??s Lab, does their local strategy. He didn't want anything. He just wanted to say keep going, that the work of putting impacts and opportunities and inclusion into the conversation, not just the business, matters.
I'd spent the days before with Anthonia Ogundele, all the way committed to her work. And now here was Chike, unprompted, recognizing ours. That was a blessing. I don't always know how to share that kind of thing, but it does give me strength, and I needed it that particular morning.
The floor moved
A contact who does community work with Microsoft put words to something I'd been feeling. Last year this floor was spy AI and investment. This year it's humanizing AI. We need workers, we need the people. Booths everywhere leaning on "AI, but with human review."
That's the social license argument I've been making, coming back at me off a trade-show floor. You can't roll this out, as a government or a company, without humans buying in.
The market just spent a year catching up to it. Is some of that verbiage cover? Sure. But the fact that it's now the cover tells you where the pressure is.
Renegade booths: me and Sam Matthews
I commandeered an empty booth two days running. Put our stickers up. By the time I'd set up, everyone walking past was going "nice booth, KK." Then I found out I wasn't the only one. Sam Matthews was doing the exact same renegade move down the floor.
Sam's the kind of founder story I can't stop thinking about. Her company Loci (we partnered with Loci to make the booth happen) is lean now: QR-code scavenger hunts for real-world safety training, sold through consultants, Toyota and Coca-Cola already on the board.
But she got there by walking away. Raised something like $7 million over seven years on a digital-twins company, and rather than court private equity to become someone she didn't want to be, she folded it. Her words: "let me turn $7 million into a pack of stickers." We got deep into "people twinning," what happens if I turn three years of community transcripts into a synthetic audience I can actually test ideas against.
Two renegades at a borrowed booth, plotting.
Three stages, one fight, and one recruit
I got ten minutes with Chris Smalls before his 2pm keynote. Founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He talked card check (the BC labour law he's in love with), the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, getting arrested crashing the Met Gala, and the line that stuck: "if I don't do the work, nobody's coming to save me."
Then Emily Loewen, leader of the BC Green Party, asked the sharpest question of the day at the end of his press conference, about radicalizing entry points, what actually grabs working people, people on the right, and brings them into the fight.
Then I sat in on Hasan Piker's press conference: "Loneliness at the End of Empire," young men, atomization, touch grass and organize, give people an ownership stake.
And here's the part that mattered most. After the press conferences, I got to brief Emily Loewen. BC + AI, the data centres, "Sovereign AI for Whom?" She walked in asking a great question from the audience and walked out an ally on the thing I'd put my neck out for that morning. The critique became a recruiting tool. That's the whole loop.
Lars Leckie bent my brain
Lars Leckie (Aspenwood Ventures, C100, tight with the Shopify founders) gave me the framework of the day: the blast radius of AI. A continuum of who gets hit, and when. Chegg was day one. Sales tooling, next ring out. Billing and system-of-record companies, maybe five years.
He told me MuleSoft, a $7 billion outcome for his fund, wouldn't be a real company today, because MCP servers just delete that category.
A startup that raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation to do AI for banking? He thinks it's dead by year-end, because OpenAI shipped a banking initiative.
But the flip side is the part I keep chewing on. One of his portfolio companies had its agentic-coding breakthrough, and realized it doesn't need to hire engineers for six to eight months. Hold costs, book revenue, and it just becomes profitable. No $20 million raise.
"This is what Claude has done in the last six months." The risk on the other side of that: the same team says if Claude Code goes down, they don't know what to do anymore.
I feel that one personally. I'm rebuilding our whole tool stack on our own data, hitting my token caps every week. I'm a powerful wizard now. Powerful wizards have dependencies.
The renegade booth. Smalls, Piker, Loewen on three stages. Lars and his blast radius. It's all one story. The extractive model (capital, labour, infrastructure, hype) is breaking, and the only question worth asking is whether what replaces it gives people a say.
My job is the connective tissue. Critique and invite. Build the nonprofit and squat the booth. Insider and outsider, both hands full, walking forward.
I put my name on the line before I'd had coffee. By the end of the day the floor, the stages, and my friends had all said the same thing back to me. The fine line isn't the risk. The fine line is the line.
The question I'm leaving Web Summit with: if everyone's building inside the blast radius now, the only thing worth building is the thing that gives people a say, so who's actually doing that, and how do we find each other faster?
And the receipts, on the data centres, on the attendance numbers, on all of it, if the story's real, they won't weaken it. They'll make it impossible to ignore
