Hey friends,

Last week we launched something I never thought I’d have to: the BC + AI Ecosystem Association.

Not because I love acronyms.
Not because we needed another org.

But because someone had to ask the hard questions while everyone else was busy training AI to print money. Questions like: Who gets to decide what "intelligence" means when you're working on unceded territory? or… 

What happens to a creative economy built on human skill when machines can mimic that skill faster and cheaper?

This isn’t theoretical. We gathered 225+ people who’ve been quietly building the future while everyone else argues about it on LinkedIn. Indigenous technologists. Software developers. Startup weirdos. AI Researchers. Educators. Designers. The kind of folks who debug code at 2am and question capitalism over coffee.

They showed up because they know the truth: BC has one of the most functional creative economies in the world… and AI is already destabilizing it from the inside.

Behind those towers in Olympic Village are decades of coordination—DigiBC defending tax credits, Vancouver Film School training talent, game studios turning this place into a global VFX hub. But now? The pipelines are shifting.

Generative models can do in seconds what professionals spent years learning.
VFX artists. Game devs. Songwriters. Animators. Poets. All feeling the heat. All watching the ground shift beneath their feet.

This moment demands more than reactive policy. It demands community-coded infrastructure. Built with place, equity, and cultural intelligence at the center.

We’re not trying to out-Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. We’re building something they can’t: An AI ecosystem rooted in values that actually mean something here.

But too often, the future of AI is being shaped somewhere else—by legacy institutions, by extractive economic models, by hype machines.

This association is our tactical response. It’s a living system. A distributed commons. A refusal to wait.

It’s a shift:

• From acceleration to alignment

• From proprietary to participatory

• From policy done to us to infrastructure built with us

We’re not here to slow AI down. We’re here to steer it somewhere worth going.

Want in?

→ Watch the launch video
→ Read the blog post
→ Join the groupchat
→ Hack with us
→ Explore the movement

Or just hit reply and tell me what you're building. I read every email.

If you’re building tools that serve more than just yourself, you’re already part of this.
If you’re holding questions that don’t fit in a pitch deck, we want to hear them.
If you’re tired of watching the future get designed by people who’ve never lived in the places they’re reshaping—

Come build it with us.

To Our Friends at Web Summit Vancouver

If you’re participating in Web Summit, you’ll hear a lot about disruption, scaling, and acceleration. Great. But here in BC, we’re doing something different. We’re prototyping what comes after.

We’re not selling AI tools—we’re weaving the infrastructure that will govern them.
We’re not building fast—we’re building with care.
We’re not asking “who will win AI?”
We’re asking what kind of intelligence deserves to exist here?

If that resonates—come find us.

Our next Vancouver AI meetup is May 28th during Web Summit Vancouver.

Come argue with us about the future. Bring your hardest questions. We're not afraid of them.

With care, context, and chaos,

Kris Krüg
 
BC + AI Ecosystem Association
778.898.3076
bc-ai.net