This week I attended an AGI Ventures event that genuinely shifted how I’m thinking about the future of work, talent, and what it means to lead people through real organizational change.

The room was full of builders, operators, and leaders, not people theorizing about AI, but people who are actually doing it inside their companies right now. That distinction matters.

AGIV INDUSTRIES V1, run by Invest Ottawa and the AGIV team – Hai Nghiem and Neilda Gagne, is exactly the kind of event Ottawa needs: no vendor pitches, no theory, just real case studies from people doing the hard work of bringing AI into their organizations. Last night was the first edition, and it delivered.

The program featured the following speakers and their subject matter below:

• • Hai Nghiem (CEO, AGI Ventures Canada): how data agents are democratizing Business Intelligence for everyone, with real case studies.

• • Ian Rintoul (AVP of Software Engineering and IT, Giatec): what happened when Giatec shipped the concrete industry’s first MCP server and gave customers direct AI access to their production, quality, and IoT fleet data. More than half connected within the first month, and the power users were QC supervisors, not data scientists.

• • Allan Ziolkowski: Having successfully deployed a fully AI-native design team at an enterprise level, Allan talks about the learnings, challenges and current state of AI in product design

• • Jawad Alaoui (Chief Data & AI Officer, Dashq): building hybrid organizations, where AI agents become computational actors working inside org structures built for humans. A framework for identity, governance, and coordination when your coworkers include both people and AI.

Moderated by Victoria McIntyre (Tech Innovation Engineering Sr. Manager, Accenture).

What made the evening stick was not just the content from the stage. My conversations with Hai and Neilda afterward surfaced something that does not get said enough: AI is one of those things you have to see and play with before the possibilities become real. Reading about it is not the same. Watching someone demo it live in a room full of peers is a completely different experience.

Neilda put her finger on something important. A lot of the hesitation inside organizations is not really about AI. It is about fear of failure. People are afraid they are going to break something. And if that is the culture, no tool rollout in the world is going to move the needle. What she described as a solution was simple and I thought it was brilliant: run mini versions of this kind of show-and-tell inside your own company. Give people a low-stakes space to experiment, share what they tried, and normalize the learning curve together.

For those of us in HR and staffing specifically, the conversation also got honest about limitations. Privacy matters enormously in our world. What you put into AI, where it goes, and how it is used are questions we have to answer carefully before we implement anything. And in a relationship-based business like ours, there is a line we will not cross. AI will never replace direct contact with our client community or our candidates. The goal is to push as much of the administrative and organizational burden onto AI as possible so that our people are freed up to do what actually matters: show up, build trust, and use the judgment that only comes from experience. There is a gut feel factor in this work that we have no interest in automating away.

One moment from the evening that I loved: Dashq, one of the featured companies, builds AI-powered dashboards for large property management companies. Midway through their talk I sent a quick message to one of my property management clients. She is already using the platform and loves it. That kind of small world moment is a good reminder of how much is already happening quietly inside the industries we serve.

What I walked away with loads of inspiration and some extremely thoughtful recommendations from an HR lens. I’ve pulled the 15 that are most relevant to anyone working in HR, talent, and people leadership. My top 5 are starred.

The Full List

★ 1. Be an AI champion. Nobody is handing out playbooks. The people making progress inside their organizations are the ones who stopped waiting for permission and started figuring it out. That’s the call to action for everyone in HR right now.

2. We are in each other’s spaces now. Designers are coding. Engineers are designing. Product people are building. The walls between roles are coming down fast, and the leaders who will thrive are the ones building human connections across those traditional boundaries before the territory gets uncomfortable.

★ 3. We all need to strive to become product builders. This is a reframe worth sitting with. It is not about learning a technical skill. It is about shifting your orientation from describing problems to building solutions. HR and talent professionals are not exempt from this shift.

4. If you are using less than 50% of a software’s features, consider building it yourself. AI has lowered the barrier to building dramatically. The argument for expensive, underutilized enterprise tools is getting harder to make.

5. Without context, your AI agent is a new grad you have to retrain every single day. Context is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire job. The organizations seeing the most value from AI are the ones that have invested in giving their agents a deep understanding of how the business actually works.

★ 6. Democratize data inside your organization. The teams winning right now are not gatekeeping information. They are making data accessible across roles, and watching their people and their agents both become dramatically more effective as a result.

★ 7. The biggest barrier to AI adoption is people. Not technology. Not process. Every single speaker on that stage gave the same answer. That should tell us something about where HR has a role to play in this transition.

8. Psychological safety is infrastructure. People are genuinely nervous about making mistakes with powerful tools. Creating an environment where they can experiment without fear is not soft work. It is foundational to any AI rollout.

9. Learning by doing beats formal training. Give people space to explore. The organizations seeing real adoption are not the ones who ran a lunch and learn. They are the ones who gave people room to try things and make them their own.

★ 10. Find your internal believers early. Whether you are rolling out a new tool or changing how your team works, trust with your internal partners is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation everything else is built on. Identify the people who believe in the mission and build with them first.

11. Do not measure AI adoption purely by output numbers. One of the speakers measures success by how people start their day. Are they reaching for the tools because they genuinely work better? That qualitative shift is the real signal.

12. AI access should mirror employee permissions. What a person can see, their agent should be able to see. Nothing more. This is both a governance principle and a trust-building one.

13. Give agents context and an outcome, not a rigid script. The models in 2026 are strong enough to find the path. Over-prescribing the process limits what they can do for you.

14. Speed gains come from shortening the whole product pipeline, not just making one role faster. When teams are working in a shared language and a shared environment, the entire delivery cycle compresses. That is where the real productivity story lives.

15. Every person on that stage started as just someone at their company trying to figure it out. No secret playbook. No special access. Just curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to go first.

My starred 5 are where I am spending my thinking time right now. But honestly, the full list has something for anyone navigating this transition inside a people-focused role.

More to come. If any of these land for you, I would love to hear what you are seeing inside your own organizations.

TAG HR Inc. is an Ottawa-based staffing and HR advisory firm with over 30 years of history in Finance, Legal, and Senior Technology placements and federal HR advisory engagements. TAG HR is the sister company of Turtle Island Staffing, an Indigenous-owned division focused on federal and Crown Corporation procurement.