5 August 2026 · 105 minutes
Co-Designing & Pursuing Purposeful AI
Purposeful AI, worth pursuing, together.
We can build almost any AI now. The harder question is who will still be carrying the problem a year from now.
This workshop opens Day 1 of the Digital Futures Symposium. On 5 August, sixty industry and academic leaders spend 105 minutes answering that question with their names attached: a pair, a price, and a 12-month commitment to carry one purposeful-AI problem forward.
- 60 leaders
- up to 30 committed pairs
- 12 months of follow-through
One question, answered in pairs.
Participants at DFS 2025 named the research-industry disconnect as a root cause of Canada’s innovation problem. This workshop picks that up where the talking stopped: how might we turn purposeful-AI research into real-world value worth pursuing, together? We count how many people leave carrying one.
Commitments become stories, and stories fill next year’s room.
Before anyone leaves the room
A pair, a price, and a trigger.
Every group writes one commitment down and reads it out: who carries it, what it costs, and what event starts the clock. Names are attached in front of sixty people, which is the only enforcement mechanism this workshop has and the only one it needs.
Check-ins at 3, 6, and 9 months
The work starts when everyone goes home.
Every pair leaves 5 August with a partner, a price, and a trigger. The CoP checks in at 3, 6, and 9 months, and we aim to bring the pairs back together at DFS 2027 for the 12-month mark.
What lands here, and when. The first check-ins land in November 2026, and this fills with what pairs report then. Nothing goes here that a pair has not already done.
Evidence, not anecdote
What gets recorded is what pairs actually did.
The CoP and the McMaster Digital Transformation Research Centre record the pilots, the templates, the budget lines, and the receipts. A commitment counts when there is something behind it, not when someone reports that it went well.
The Innovation Report
Every story starts as a commitment.
A story earns its place when a pair reaches a 3, 6, or 9-month mark with something real behind it. The annual Innovation Report gathers those stories into the case that brings industry, and its problems, to the next workshop’s slate.
What fills this, and when. First stories: with the November 2026 check-ins. The Innovation Report: ahead of DFS 2027.
The next slate
Put a problem on the next workshop’s slate.
Industry closes the flywheel. Bring a problem someone is actually paying to solve, and it can hold a station on the next workshop’s slate, which is how the room stays tied to real work. If you want sixty senior cross-sector builders on your problem, with academic partners attached and a 12-month commitment mechanism behind it, we should talk.
DFS 2025
Celebrate and commercialize more success. Build the flywheel. Participant, DFS 2025
2025 proved the appetite. This room has to produce owners.
Attendance was never the problem: about 120 people came to DFS 2025 and left with perspectives they had not considered. This workshop changes the measure for its own room. Sixty arrive, and 105 minutes are judged by how many leave owning one problem and a date.
Smith AI Product CoP · MDTRC
One community designs and delivers this workshop.
The Smith AI Product Community of Practice designs and delivers the Digital Futures Symposium Day 1 workshop with the McMaster Digital Transformation Research Centre, across Smith, Ivey, DeGroote, and SIG DITE. Dr. Milena Head, Director of the MDTRC, and Bradley Hartwick, Director of the Smith AI Product CoP, co-lead it.
We built this site and its playbook the way the workshop teaches: AI to widen the choices, people to make them. The playbook’s appendix carries the full disclosure.