The Same Script, Told Again and Again

By the end of the first day of ALL IN, I noticed that speakers had started to repeat each other. Whatever the panel, the message was some version of "AI is urgent, it will change everything, and we need to retain our sovereignty."

At first, I thought the problem was me. I'm a software developer at heart, so maybe my appetite was just to hear about code and see it in action. The more I listened, though, the clearer it became that I wasn't missing technical depth so much as lived experience. Almost nobody explained how AI had changed their own organization. Every news outlet already tells us AI is the next big thing, so a room full of practitioners should be able to tell us something the headlines can't. Where did you start? What did you try? What worked, what failed, and what would you do differently if you started over tomorrow? I heard almost none of that.

Instead, a large share of the programme went to investment, governance and data sovereignty. Those topics matter, and some of those conversations were excellent, but they stay high up. They tell you where the money is going, and very little about what happens when a team sits down and tries to use the technology.

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Sovereignty is not residency

Some panellists did say things every executive should hear, and it was good to hear this one said out loud: data sovereignty is not the same as data residency.

Many people still mix up the two. A provider tells you your data sits in a Canadian data centre, and that feels like control, but where your data is stored doesn't decide who can reach it or what happens to it. Canadian lawyers and infrastructure providers have warned that data held by a foreign-owned provider can still fall under that provider's home-country laws. The best-known example is the U.S. CLOUD Act, which can apply even when the servers are in Canada.

AI adds another layer that is easy to miss. Real sovereignty also means controlling how the AI services you use treat your data. A service that trains on your information as you use it doesn't forget that information when you vacate the premises because it keeps footprints of it in its DNA. Vendor lock-in used to be about contracts and migration costs, and now it's also about what you have already handed over without realizing it. That makes every AI vendor decision a riskier one than it looks.

That distinction is exactly why the investments announced around ALL IN matter. Two days before ALL IN, Bell announced a $50-billion expansion of its AI data-centre project in Saskatchewan, the largest private capital investment in Canadian history. At the event itself, Canada and Germany committed new funding to LawZero, a lab building trustworthy AI, and held the first meeting of their Sovereign Technology Alliance.

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An Invitation to Experiment

I would have loved to hear more trial and error from the stage. I understand why it's rare. AI isn't a fixed target, and what you say today may look naive in six months, so sharing an experiment that didn't work takes courage.

The industry won't wait for anyone to catch up, though. Enormous sums are flowing into infrastructure, and impatient shareholders are waiting for their returns. If the target keeps moving, our processes must move with it, which means faster thinking and more experimentation. Waiting for AI to be perfect before getting on the train means never getting on at all. The internet has never been perfect either but somehow, we have managed to work with it.

So start now, with what you have, and share what you learn, failures included. That's what I was hoping to hear from the stage.

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We no longer have an AI problem. We have a talent problem.

The idea I heard most, and the one I agree with most, is that technology is no longer the bottleneck. People are. What we have to work out is how to build the skills, habits and judgment our organizations need to use these tools well. Canada and Germany both named talent as a priority, and that priority now has to reach every team, not just the research labs.

As a developer, I left ALL IN wanting more. As someone who manages a team of developers, I left a little reassured because nobody in that building has found the magic formula that makes everyone ten times faster. A company is more than its developers. Make developers ten times faster while everyone around them stays the same, or slows down trying to keep up, and you haven't solved anything. You've just moved the bottleneck downstream.