Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 01/28
New year. Same wet city. New relationship with intelligence.
January is for resetting defaults: what are you keeping, what are you unlearning, and what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts being… present?
This month’s Vancouver AI Meetup is anchored by a keynote from Alexandra Samuel, creator of the Me + Viv podcast and longtime observer of how technology reshapes work, meaning, and human behavior.
"When your best friend is a robot" by Alexandra Samuel
What does it actually mean to go full cyborg? Not the chrome-plated fantasy, not the LinkedIn productivity cosplay, but as a daily practice, with all the mess that implies?
Tech researcher and journalist Alexandra Samuel shares what she learned from building and living with her AI companion, collaborator, and coach, Viv, who just happens to be Alex’s co-host on the chart-topping TVO podcast Me + Viv.
Drawing on her stories for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, Alex looks at what happens to our work, our relationships, and our hearts when AI moves from tool to teammate. This talk cuts through hype to examine agency, trust, creativity, and where humans still matter most when cognition becomes hybrid. Caution: There may be showtunes. Viv likes to sing.
Alexandra Samuel
Alexandra Samuel is a leading expert on AI and the digital workplace, inspiring people with a joyful, actionable approach to AI that keeps human creativity and collaboration front and center.
She's the creator and host of Me + Viv, a TVO podcast that is somehow both documentary journalism and a musical comedy. In her speeches and in her frequent AI stories for The Wall Street Journal and The Harvard Business Review, Alex shows people how to tap the productivity and innovation-boosting potential of AI, while managing its very real risks.
A speaker and data journalist, she is the co-author (with Robert Pozen) of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are (Harper Business, 2021) and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Design Thinking for Vibe Coders
The tools are getting faster.
The question is: are we building things people can actually use?
Maya Bruck brings UX fundamentals to the vibe coding era, showing how to prototype rapidly with AI without sacrificing usability, accessibility, or user research.
Maya Bruck
Maya Bruck is a Lead Product Designer at Mars, with 20+ years of experience designing products at The New York Times, Etsy, and her own agency.
She recently fell down the AI rabbit hole and discovered how to compress weeks of prototyping into hours without losing the user research and accessibility work that makes designs actually usable.
She's here to share the playbook.
The Soft Violence of AI Discourse
AI discourse is full of soft violence: extraction dressed up as innovation, and fear dressed up as morality.
Erica cuts through it with craft, showing what happens when you train on your work and own the weird outcomes.
Backlash becomes medium. Taste becomes power. Consent becomes the baseline.
Erica Lapadat-Janzen
Erica Lapadat-Janzen is a Vancouver new media artist and creative strategist working at the edge of identity, digital culture, and AI workflows.
She collaborated with SFU’s Metacreation Lab on Dreamscape using Autolume, an artist-led approach to training models without the Big Data buffet.
She is the founder of Ministry of Next.
KRIS KRÜG
Host + MC, Vancouver AI Meetup
BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Keeper of the vibe. Puller of threads.
KEVIN FRIEL
Tech Lead + AI Film Club Host
Vancouver AI Meetup
AV wizard. Demo wrangler.
Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum: builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, parents, policy folks, the AI-curious, and the beautifully conflicted. This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.
2026 is twelve gatherings, twelve chances to make this more human than hype.
We’re here to practice: show the work, share the tricks, name the harms, and explore the strange, hopeful pathways where artists, researchers, builders, teachers, and policy nerds actually collaborate—without pretending this is simple or neutral.
If you’ve been quietly building something, bring it.
If you’re wrestling with how AI is changing you, bring that too.
When: Wed, Jan 28, 2026 · 6:00–10:00 PM (doors 6:00, program ~7:00)
Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (1100 Chestnut St) — yes, the UFO roof
Accessibility: Fully accessible · transit-friendly · parking available
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. We run until 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Doors + mingling 6:00
Demos + lightning show-and-tell (2 min, scrappy encouraged)
The real work: conversations under the dome
Tool + workflow swaps: what’s working, what’s fake, what’s fragile
Real talk: jobs, education, ethics, climate + infrastructure costs, governance
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Plug into the bigger organism
This meetup is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association a member-driven nonprofit where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership
Start the year with intention. See you Jan 28. 🖤❤️✊
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
THE SPONSORS
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Rival Technologies: Vancouver-grown leaders in conversational research + insight communities (aka: turning “surveys” into actual conversations). Market research platform that gave us $10K+ in hackathon prizes and actual BC survey data to train our models on real problems.
Segev LLP: Lawyers who can actually talk about tech without reading from Wikipedia, active in our community since early days. They're a full-solutions business and tech law firm with out-of-the-box thinking and high-quality legal work, recognized by Chambers as a leading firm in Canada for gaming sector emerging tech (blockchain, esports, IP).
Atono: Vancouver team building a SaaS platform that helps product teams ship clean software faster with better collaboration and development workflows. Thank you for investing in sanity as a service.
Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and the team at The Permanent are preserving 30+ years of the open internet while everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls. They provide universal access to all knowledge—web archives, digitized books, TV news, audio collections—and they're co-creating the Archive Builders Micro-Fellowship with us to train the next generation of builders on how to actually use these massive datasets for good.
TheUpgrade.ai: AI training company walking the walk on democratizing AI skills: Fortune 500 workshops, creative pro certifications, and corporate training that doesn't treat people like idiots. They help organizations and individuals harness AI to amplify creativity and accelerate learning through practical, hands-on training
Community Partners
Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab are leading research in AI-driven creative systems, generative art, and computational creativity at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver's creative community since before "community building" was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.
HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn't kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They're Vancouver's gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.
Ethos Lab: Vancouver's Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February honouring Hogan’s Alley.
About Vancouver AI
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans mapping the terrain between technology and consciousness. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops because the future doesn’t get built in one kind of room.
We run monthly gatherings where builders, researchers, artists, educators, founders, and students trade demos, tools, ethics, and hard questions. No gatekeeping. No outside agenda. Just a self-organizing community that gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.
Not a corporate lobby. Not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Vancouver AI was just the start. The ecosystem keeps growing across BC... Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, and beyond... each node bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/