The 2026 Agenda

We’re kicking off the 11th edition of SAAS NORTH AI with our SaaSiest Host Manuela Bárcenas. Hear the overview of the exciting 2-day conference, line up of speakers, and what prizes are to be won!

Welcome to the Great Reset. AI has blown up the old playbook, the channels, the tactics, the certainties everyone used to lean on. We’ll walk through the parts of the “old” SEO playbook, highlighting what just doesn’t work anymore and what you should keep doing. 

Then we’ll go over what you need to win in an AI world. In a word, receipts. 

Nobody’s figured out this new world yet, which means the whole industry is starting from the same line, and that’s the biggest opportunity SaaS has seen in years. 

Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds opens SAAS NORTH as our guide through it, with one unshakeable belief: however much changes, sales still come down to trust, and trust is still earned by humans. 

This is the moment for those of you who didn’t do the “shortcuts” — in an AI world, you are more likely than ever to be rewarded for years of authentic, open, and transparent communications about your product & services, strengths and weaknesses, and your company’s struggles and victories. 

This is your rally cry to think differently, then act differently. 

Canadians have grown skeptical of their own tech sector’s ambition — and the skepticism is earned. Ali Asaria, who’s built and exited companies from Well.ca to Tulip (where he gave away 80% of his shares to an employee-owned trust) and is now building Transformer Lab, makes the case that trust isn’t lost forever — it’s rebuilt through specific choices about ownership, distribution, and who actually benefits when a company wins. The stakes are higher than ever: the same leaders who lost the public’s trust are now the ones steering the most disruptive shift in history, and they need to earn it back before it’s too late.

Capital in Canada is scarcer than it used to be — venture funding in Ottawa alone has dropped from roughly $600M a year to $125M over the last two years, and Canadian VC firms have posted zero distributions back to their own investors in eight years. So when a Canadian AI-native founder raises their next round in San Francisco instead of Toronto or Ottawa, it’s not always about loyalty — it’s often just where the term sheets actually are. In this session, founders and investors get candid about how they actually got funded: who said yes, who said no, and why some of the country’s most promising AI-native companies are choosing Silicon Valley capital over homegrown options. No elbows-up spin — just the real calculus founders are running when they decide where to raise, and what it means for building (and staying) in Canada.