Greenbook was one of Generation1.ca’s very first industry partners supporting our mission in meaningful ways long before immigrant inclusion, ethical AI, and global talent infrastructure became widely discussed priorities across the insights industry. They helped create space for more diverse voices to be seen on stages, in publications, through awards, and across professional networks. That support included recognizing our Founder and CEO, Arundati Dandapani, through the inaugural GRIT Futures List, a recognition that emerged during a time when many industry members, including us, were actively voicing the opportunity via consultations for more future-facing global talent recognition in increasingly disrupted times. Credit goes to Lenny Murphy and the wider leadership at Greenbook for listening, adapting, and helping create visibility pathways for emerging and unconventional leadership voices shaping the future of insights.
Fast forward to April 29 and April 30, 2026, and Generation1.ca’s CEO was invited again to present at IIEX North America 2026 — always a humbling opportunity to engage with some of the sharpest minds across research, analytics, AI, and insight-tech. This year’s session, Frontier Innovations with Generation1.ca’s Immigrant Nations: Why Global Post-Digital Talent is the Next Infrastructural Advantage, explored one of the most underestimated and underleveraged competitive differentiators in the modern economy: talent.
What makes IIEX special is not simply the technology on display, but the ongoing conversations about how humans, systems, governance, innovation, and decision-making evolve together.
Generation1.ca brings a critical perspective to the wider data, analytics, and insights world as a professional community organization and non-profit focused on designing supports that help global immigrants integrate into the workforce while navigating the complex economic, cultural, technological, and social challenges that shape modern migration and belonging across North America. That vantage point matters deeply in today’s environment because the future of evidence, innovation, and institutional growth increasingly depends on understanding populations, workforces, and realities that many organizations still struggle to see clearly. CEO and Founder Arundati Dandpani’s presentation argued that immigrant and globally experienced talent should not be viewed as a side conversation about inclusion, but as hidden infrastructure powering economic resilience, innovation, governance, cultural intelligence, and long-term institutional adaptability. Not diversity as optics. Not inclusion as a communications exercise. But talent as long-term economic and innovation infrastructure. The session explored how organizations are still dramatically underleveraging one of the least visible trillion-dollar advantages available to them: globally mobile, multilingual, adaptive, technically capable people who often sit outside traditional leadership and innovation pipelines despite carrying immense intercultural, economic, and problem-solving capacity.
As I also discussed in my IIEX North America presentation our engagements with Remitly and Securian Canada among many other immigrant-supporting brands showed how Generation1.ca’s initiatives connect immigrant financial resilience, workforce integration, and leadership into a broader case for global talent as infrastructure — not just community impact, but competitive advantage. Of course, we had to talk about our 10th anniversary celebrations last year as well, it being a perfect opportunity to recalibrate our milestones with the communities around us, flooded in data and mixed messages, but starving for insight about the future of immigration.
Audience participation revealed fascinating interpretations of what truly drives competitive advantage in a disrupted era. Responses ranged from data quality, fighting fraud, new research methodologies, ethics, humanitarian aid, quality, governance, and ultimately, people themselves. In many ways, those responses reinforced the central argument of the presentation: the future of innovation cannot be separated from the future of trust, representation, human capability, and institutional adaptability. The discussion and presentation also connected immigrant inclusion with broader conversations around AI governance, synthetic data, labor transformation, public trust, and the future of evidence ecosystems. As AI systems scale globally, organizations increasingly need humans who can navigate ambiguity, cultural complexity, policy differences, and emerging governance realities, not merely technical systems. In the audience question and answer session our Founder was asked a number of questions about the evolving topicality of immigration in the Americas, how immigrants find out about Generation1.ca, and also about the relevance of this topic in the years to come.
We were also deeply grateful to have been invited by Gregg Archibald and Rolfe Swinton to participate in discussions connected to the Insights Innovation Ventures Fund gathering. The conversation brought together leaders thinking critically about the future of insight innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, and where the industry must evolve next amid immense technological acceleration and changing business realities.
And perhaps fittingly for a week centered on global transformation and institutional evolution, the conference concluded with thoughtful conversations alongside Lucy Davison, Nadia Frigiola, David Lundahl about the future role of global industry and our associations in a rapidly evolving landscape.
As research, AI, governance, and global labor markets continue to shift simultaneously, industry associations themselves are being challenged to rethink value creation, membership, visibility, inclusion, and how they convene increasingly fragmented but interconnected professional communities worldwide.
The future of insights will not simply belong to organizations with the best technology. It will belong to those capable of building trusted, human-centered, globally intelligent systems, and the talent ecosystems that sustain them. Thank you Greenbook for the partnership and support over the years through our continued collaborations.
Check out the LinkedIn post here.
And the conversations continue. Join us on August 7 in Toronto for Generation1.ca’s Tastes of Tomorrow: A Festival of Global Identities — where food, culture, business, and community collide. Bring your brand or organization to the table. Partner with us to create cultural, community, and economic impact.
Check out the full presentation deck here. Questions? Email arundati@generation1.ca
