The agenda for the Elevate Festival in Toronto caught my attention. The event took place at Meridian Hall and the St. Lawrence Centre for Arts, which are nearly adjacent venues, last week. The combination of sessions, speakers and, what they call, masterclasses seemed intriguing both personally and professionally. My primary focus is AI at the workplace and those sessions were my main reason for attending naturally.
First though, one question lingers for anyone who knows. There were neither floats nor confetti. No one was dancing, throwing candy or engaging in revelry, but seriously, the question was, why is it called a “festival”?

Elevate festival
Oddly, there was another ‘festival’ called Future Festival occurring in Toronto concurrently. Surely, it can’t be a coincidence.
Returning to the conference, while AI was a prominent theme, the three-day event offered more than just discussions on the hot topic of Artificial Intelligence. There were start-ups and funders, a sales course, sessions for creative professionals and implicit infomercials for the speakers and their companies. Met a couple of nice people in line looking to sell their services and found out outsourced marketing and sales departments are more in-demand than ever. Some say AI is going to make both obsolete… or is outsourcing departments the first step towards elimination?
Here are a few things learned from the event:
- A speaker emphasized that AI is software and should be treated exactly as such. That is, it can be used for good or evil and we should have the same expectations for it as we have for (other) software, the Internet or other pieces of technology. Think about it, that is the gist of it, isn’t it?
- Emphasis was placed on the importance of experimentation. AI is still in its infancy and enterprises need to move forward even when use cases are not fully defined and also because there will be many use cases that companies do not even know they need yet. It is important to begin experimenting and exploring possibilities.
- A few humanitarian use cases cited and demonstrated were: wildfire detection, Foundation For Healthcare, which is like AI from a medical school, and Alphafold, which by classifying and identifying the structure of protein is advancing medicine in the fight against disease.
- A speaker mentioned that whatever you do, don’t do the ostrich.
- According to KPMG research, companies aiming to excel in SEO and demand generation for AI should aim to publish three pieces of content (such as a white paper, blog post or solution PDFs) on their websites each week.
- While transparency and accountability are crucial in the usage and deployment of AI, most LLMs (Large Language Models) already incorporate ethical practices. This was done even before the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act went into force on August 1st, mandating GDPR, privacy and PII practices.
- The CDO (Chief Data Officer) from Telus and IBM’s VP for AI shared that they can’t be any more explicit about safety protocols built into AI than by saying they have opened AI to all their employees, including developers, internally themselves without exception.
- IBM, Meta (which has experienced 350 million downloads of its Llama model) and Mozilla all reminded attendees that their LLMs are open source and subject to scrutiny by the world-wide community.
- KPMG’s Canadian AI lead: “AI will be in every function in every industry” and “our analysis shows a 72% ROI in 3 three years” for the enterprise, numbers he characterized as “unchartered” return numbers.
- Finally, someone boldly described the situation with AI a rising tide lifting all boats, highlighting the collective potential of these advancements.
The event was educational even if there was a lot of ‘what’ without the ‘how’ at the sessions on my agenda. Companies like Telus, Google, Meta, IBM and Mozilla made the effort to appear.
Things That Need To Go Away: ‘Educational’ Sessions At Paid Conferences That Are Implicit Advertisements