How a session in Montreal is put together
Every keynote is tailored after a briefing call, and the larger engagements start before the day rather than on it: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the room hears its own evidence rather than somebody else's. What the room leaves with is written down.
What that has looked like: an agency business convening Asia, Asia-Pacific, EMEA and North America into one event, where the work was naming the recurring situations nobody had vocabulary for, and the company took that wording into its strategy; and a division of a very large company permitted exactly one AI tool, which after the constraint was examined moved to a multi-tool sandbox with different functions choosing different models, then repeated across further divisions.
Six of the seven engagements published on this site produced further work after the session rather than at it. The seven are set out in full at case studies, each with a line saying what it does not show.
How to read these examples. They are published to show how the work is put together, not as a client list for Montreal. Most engagements are covered by confidentiality and are described without naming anyone; where a client is named anywhere on this site, it is with their agreement.
The right to argue with a named human
Section 12.1 of Quebec’s private-sector privacy act has been in force since 22 September 2023 and has never been amended. Where an enterprise uses personal information to reach a decision based exclusively on an automated processing, it must say so by the time it gives the decision, and on request must give the information used, the reasons and principal factors, and the right to correct the data.
Then comes the sentence that makes it different from every other instrument on this continent. The person concerned must be given the opportunity to submit observations to a member of the personnel of the enterprise who is in a position to review the decision.
Read that carefully, because it is not a right to an explanation. It is a right to argue with a specific human being who has the authority to change the answer. Section 65.2 of the access act says the same thing for public bodies. Both were enacted in 2021 and both came into force on the same day.
A keynote can put the practical question to a Montreal room in one line. Who, in your organisation, is that member of personnel? Name them. And then the harder half, which is the subject of who supervises work they cannot do: could that person actually redo the analysis they are empowered to overturn?
Quebec's own regulator says the human is where it fails
On 27 January 2025 the Commission d’accès à l’information submitted a mémoire to the ministry of labour titled L’IA au travail: pour un meilleur encadrement. In the section on meaningful human intervention it says that where a human ratifies a decision proposed by an AI system without studying the whole analysis, there is a risk of biais d’automatisation, placing excessive trust in the system.
A North American regulator, in its own submission, naming automation bias as the mechanism by which its own province’s safeguard stops working. That document is the closest thing in Canada to an official statement of the argument in these keynotes, and it is sitting in French on a government website where the English-language conference circuit never looks.
The same mémoire is candid about the limits of sections 12.1 and 65.2, and honesty about limits is worth more on a stage than the provision alone. Organisations need not disclose at collection that the data will feed a fully automated decision. The sections do not apply where a decision is not fully automated, which is most of them. No criterion defines how consequential an action must be to count as a decision. And the burden sits on the individual to ask. A right that has to be requested by somebody who has not been told it exists is a right on paper. The Commission’s sixth recommendation goes further and proposes prohibiting fully automated decisions with significant effects on employees.
What Quebec has measured
The Institut de la statistique du Québec published its figures on 28 November 2025. In the second quarter of 2025, 12.7 per cent of Quebec businesses used AI, up from 9.4 per cent. Modest, and lower than most rooms assume.
The second number is the one that belongs on a slide. Among Quebec businesses, 37.7 per cent reported that AI use had reduced, moderately or largely, tasks previously carried out by employees. Set the two side by side and the arithmetic does not sit still: far more businesses report tasks being displaced than report using AI at all, which tells you how the question is being answered inside organisations that have not described what they are doing as adoption.
That is drift with a provincial statistics office behind it. The pattern, and what it does to the work juniors used to learn on, is at missing rungs.
On language, and being straight about it
Keynotes are delivered in English. Rahim reads the Quebec instruments in French and quotes them in French where the French is the operative text, because the official English version of section 12.1 is a translation and one clause is phrased impersonally in the original. A Montreal audience will hear the provision in the language it was written in, and everything around it in English.
If a room needs simultaneous interpretation or a French-language speaker, say so early and the honest answer will come back quickly, including a recommendation elsewhere if that is the right answer.
Who books this in Montreal, and who should not
Boards and executive committees, financial services, insurance, aerospace and professional services leadership, HR and talent conferences, and the AI research community around Mila and the universities. Montreal is unusual in having both a serious concentration of AI research and a statute that constrains how the output of it may be used on a person.
He is the wrong choice for a tools demonstration, a vendor showcase or a technical AI briefing, and for any brief that needs an optimistic message with the difficult part removed. If that is the brief, the guide to choosing an AI keynote speaker names four other kinds of speaker and when to pick each.
The three keynotes a Montreal room can book
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences; the full argument needs 40 or more. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
Most organisations are adopting AI by drift: a thousand reasonable decisions that add up to judgement nobody chose to give away. Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills, shows leaders which mode they are running, where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it, and hands them the controls.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
AI makes everyone faster, stronger and more capable. It does not decide; people do. Through a family story across four generations and three continents, Rahim Hirji hands the audience the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Business is being rewired as AI arrives, and human judgement is leaving with it. In three acts, Rahim Hirji shows a board what AI is changing in how organisations run, then ends with a live test of the board's own judgement, in the room and in real time. Nobody forgets the result.
Where these sessions happen in Montreal
Every capacity below is the venue’s own published figure. The Palais publishes its maximum capacities with a note that they are guidelines and may change, which is a more honest disclaimer than most venues offer and worth respecting.
- Palais des congrès de Montréal
- 113 multipurpose spaces across seven floors, 508,756 square feet of rental space of which 396,785 is exhibition. Room 517abcd is the largest ballroom at 45,334 square feet and 5,615 theatre; the 220 series seats 12,143 theatre, and the building's stated maximum with the extensions in use is 13,863. The room decides the talk here more than anywhere else in the city.
- Mila, 6666 Saint-Urbain Street, Mile-Ex
- The Quebec AI institute, over 90,000 square feet at its 2019 inauguration, community of more than 1,400 people. The Agora and Agora-Café take up to 350. A different kind of room: an audience that will interrogate the evidence rather than accept it, which is the right audience for this argument.
- Le Centre Sheraton Montréal
- 23 event rooms, 41,816 square feet in total, and a Salle de Bal seating 1,835. Downtown, with delegates in the building.
- Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth
- 30 venues taking from 15 to 1,600 guests, the largest room 742 square metres seating 700 theatre. The default for a Montreal corporate conference that wants a plenary and a breakout ladder under one roof.
- Grand Quai du Port de Montréal
- Up to 4,000 people, with Terminal T1 at 3,478 square metres, 1,664 theatre and 3,275 for a cocktail reception. Waterfront, and better for an evening than a working session.
The Montreal calendar, from organisers’ own pages rather than listing sites. ALL IN runs 16 and 17 September 2026 at the Palais, with the organiser expecting over 7,500 attendees from more than 40 countries and 260-plus speakers. MTL connect runs 13 to 16 October 2026 at the Society for Arts and Technology. ConFoo is 24 to 26 February 2027 at the Bonaventure, and Startupfest 7 to 9 July 2027.
Two corrections worth having before a calendar is built. C2 Montréal is not running in 2026. Its own site says it is taking a pause from the annual May gathering and exploring a new format, and it has not announced a 2027 return in either language, whatever the tourism listings say. And Movin’On has left the city altogether: the summit now runs in Paris.
