What is intelligence?
It is one of those things we recognize instantly in people, systems, communities, and now, machines. Yet we keep seeking more of it: emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, contextual intelligence, cultural intelligence, artificial intelligence
At this year’s IAPP Canada Symposium between 4-7 May 2026, one of my favourite local conferences on AI governance, privacy, cybersecurity, and digital responsibility, that question followed me everywhere. Through my years as an IAPP Certification Advisory Board member and through Generation1.ca, I have had the privilege to speak, connect, write, and learn with this community. Led by Kris Klein and an outstanding advisory board, this annual Symposium continues to be one of the best spaces to explore how intelligence becomes responsibility.
Several discussions this year highlighted how governance frameworks continue to evolve alongside technology. I will reference those conversations as and when I see the synergy with current actions and implications. Canada’s Directive on Automated Decision-Making, developed through the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, remains one of the world’s most practical examples of responsible AI governance in the public sector, providing parameters and guardrails for the use of automated decision-making systems in government. Ashley Casovan and I discussed more in an episode of Leading by Association last month. We also vividly remembered Kay Firth-Butterfield as well for setting a strong precedent for global AI leaders since all her achievements for the field! AI adoption in Canada is being framed around three pillars of sovereignty, standards, and literacy, where control over infrastructure, workforce readiness and trusted governance determine whether AI creates shared prosperity – Erica Ren, Sean Mullin André Côté all weighed in.
Some of the most thought-provoking conversations at the Symposium centered on Indigenous data sovereignty and the tension between individual and collective ownership. Canada’s privacy framework has largely evolved around the rights of the individual. Privacy, consent, access and control are typically discussed through the lens of the individual data subject. Yet Indigenous approaches to data sovereignty introduce a different perspective, one where information is not only personal but also collective.
Jonathan Dewar‘s detailed discussion of OCAP principles – Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession – highlighted that communities, cultures, and nations may hold legitimate interests in how information about them is collected, interpreted, stored, and shared. As the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) notes “Good, culturally relevant data helps communities evaluate their own progress, and develop a better understanding of the relationship between community infrastructure and individual well-being.” Ontario’s Information Commissioner Patricia Kosseim‘s complementing reflections as the co-panelist reinforced the idea that privacy conversations are increasingly intersecting with broader questions of stewardship, governance, and collective rights but also reminding the audience of all the provincial regulation guidance updates from healthcare, to deidentification to AI in the public sector and lots more. Savion Nakogee, Chelsea Nakogee and @Jeff Doctor (Aniimiki) also shared that indigenous data sovereignty requires understanding sovereignty, power and law and why this matters globally when it comes to relational accountability, equity and building long-term trust.
The discussion naturally provoked larger questions around identity. Much of modern data governance assumes intelligence belongs to individuals. But what happens when culture is collective as can be in societies where identities reside in communities, cultures, traditions, languages and shared oral and other histories. As societies become increasingly datafied and documented, the tension between individual rights and collective rights may become one of the defining governance challenges of our era.
We hear a lot about human data these days, a concept I remember first lecturing students on at York University with much welcome reception into cultural forms of human existence that could be captured best in the stories (values) people fed on and fostered. Indigenous data sovereignty offers not only an important framework for First Nations communities, but also a lens through which we might rethink governance for other communities whose realities are often poorly represented, fragmented or invisible within traditional systems, including populations in transition like migrants and transnational publics.
Governance, then, is not simply about protecting information. It is also about deciding who has the authority, knowledge and expertise to tell a community’s story, preserve its knowledge, and shape its future in fair, respectful and dignified ways.
The Symposium also arrived at an interesting moment in Canada’s policy landscape with discussions around modernizing the federal Privacy Act and strengthening governance frameworks preceding the more recent formal “announcements” related to Canada’s long-awaited national AI strategy which were frankly no surprise and elements of which I have been presenting all year at various conferences whether we are tackling AI adoption and literacy gaps or more critically governance gaps. Together, these discussions however, reveal that privacy, AI governance, Indigenous data sovereignty, and public-sector modernization are no longer separate conversations. They are converging into a broader resolve about active digital awareness, responsibility and collective futures.
Ojas Rege of OneTrust framed the AI arms race through three clear pressures: technology providers chasing performance advantage, nations pursuing economic and strategic advantage, and enterprises seeking business advantage. His takeaway was that governance professionals must protect the ROI of AI, just as privacy / governance should remain the enablers of innovation. Without trust, accountability, and risk-based prioritization, AI may scale quickly, but its value becomes harder to sustain.
There were some interesting sessions on regulatory sandboxes in Canada versus US and the lessons that can be learned from regions with higher AI adoption rates like the UAE and Singapore. AI governance in North America is evolving through different but converging paths: Canada through proposed risk-based legislation and sandboxes, and the US through sectoral rules, state laws, infrastructure investment and experimentation with some discussion around the US AI Action Plan in the context of cross-border comparisons and learnings.
My annual conference friend Jessica Olsen, Ed.D (pictured above) who visits us from Nebraska each year and researches women in ICT careers abroad (ie immigrants like Generation1.ca members), shared one of the sharpest takeaways from the event: we can no longer use ignorance (with tech platforms) as an excuse to avoid liability. That lesson travels well beyond AI. It applies equally to privacy, governance, leadership, workforce integration, and the choices organizations make every day as they balance experimentation with accountability.
For Generation1.ca members, these conversations carry particular significance. Our Global Industry Skills Study continues to show that tech readiness, including AI and digital literacy, is the strongest predictor of immigrant members’ intent to stay, work, and build long-term futures in their host country. Digital readiness is no longer simply a workforce issue. It is increasingly an integration issue, an inclusion issue, and a belonging issue. If you are an employer who works across any of these fields, please take our 5-min survey to shape talent pipelines and skills of the future.
And then there was Ed (pictured above)- Feroot Security‘s autonomous robot with its human bosses Jeremy Nazarian , Ivan Tsarynny, Vitaliy Lim coddling him in our midst. Ed could record, analyze, and respond to the environment around him with human oversight. He arrived as a spectacle, generated curiosity, posed for photographs, shook hands and chatted eagerly a little bit, and then quietly faded into the background. Almost like a shy conference attendee. Great as well to run into Sérgio Abreu who had taken a video byte of me for the EDPO (European Data Protection Office), and my repeat podcast guest Marco Cantin, AIGP, CIPP/E, CIPP/C, CIPT, FIP who expressed hope in how human-centric the themes of the conference still were. This reminded me of an earlier conversation with Leanne Kinnear on the networking motivations and sometimes non-motivations within technology developer communities. Her observations helped explain why this Symposium is different from many hard-STEM gatherings: the emphasis here was not only on technology and regulations, but on building governance, trust, relationships, and policy impacts with the human systems surrounding it.
That is why the metaphor. Robot architectures are ultimately human architectures. They reflect our choices, our priorities, and the societies we are trying to build. When we embed them with trust, we grow trust. Robot architectures are becoming archetypes of insight. They show us how systems observe, classify, respond, disappear and still shape the room. They remind us that every intelligent system carries a social, privacy and trust architecture.
Humanoid robots made overseas (just like cheap overseas / precarious human labour of the past!) may help with dangerous, repetitive or high-risk work like in mines, bathrooms, kitchens, manufacturing. The robots may also be hacked, manipulated, or misused. They may make workplaces smoother and luxurious while making governance harder. We already see early examples of robots taking on operational and clerical and concierge tasks in corporate environments, raising new questions about privacy, autonomy, security, and accountability. The real test of our intelligence (and ultimately theirs) lives in how we balance innovation with accountability, capability with wisdom, and automation with humanity.
Conferences like the IAPP Canada Symposium bring together the people willing to ask what technology can do, what responsibility demands and what kind of society we are building through every data, tech, AI and human governance system we design. Thank you IAPP and to everyone we met for an inspiring few days of this conference.
Learn more at Generation1.ca and www.generation1.ca or on the post on LinkedIn.
Check out this clip below from a pre-networking discussion with Jessica Olsen.
