About

The most honest AI conversation happening this year has a home. It's in Vancouver.

BC + AI exists because people deserve more than mysticism, panic, and vendor decks when the tools start moving under their feet. Futureproof Festival brings the people whose lives are changing into a festival honest enough for critique, curiosity, culture, and practical work.

Most AI conversations want you to pick a side. Boosters or doomers. All in or all out. A festival refuses that frame. It welcomes in the teacher who can't normally make a tech conference, the doctor wondering what AI means for their practice, the citizen who wants a voice in policy decisions. The industry already has its own rooms.

A three-day festival supports one honest conversation. People meet the same ideas from different angles and have to live with them together for a minute. That's what a panel can't do. What a conference can't do. That's the thing worth building.

We walk forward with both hands full: critique in one hand, curiosity in the other. Genre-smashing, silo-busting, and a little mischief, because the future has been taking itself far too seriously.

Festival Director

Kris Krüg

I've long dreamt of an avant-garde festival of the future, a mix of culture and business and science and art. I didn't start these meetups to start a meetup. I wanted to have this big event, but I didn't have any community yet. So we started hosting meetups. And the meetups took on a mind of their own. It led to the nonprofit. It expanded. Which brought us here.

Futureproof Festival 2026 brings opening night and two program days to H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. It distills what we have learned from years of community gatherings into three days we can make excellent instead of merely impressive.

Core principles

Human-centric

"Where is the human-centric fork in this?" (Kevin Friel)

Genre-smashing, silo-busting

Cross-pollinating disciplines beyond AI-specific silos. Ethics with engineering. Film with research. Policy with poetry.

Resiliency through community

Building together, not spectating. The festival is a place to show up as a participant, not a well-dressed tab hoarder.

Both/and thinking

Critique in one hand, curiosity in the other. We refuse the false choice between boosters and doomers.

Why it starts with a question

Every principle above started as something we asked, not something we knew.

That is also why teachers, clinicians, and students belong in this room as much as anyone building the technology. The festival is built for people willing to sit with a question instead of reaching for the nearest confident answer.

Hand-painted Futureproof Festival poster reading "Teach the Question, Not Just the Tool." over a shared learning table — Why this oneFluency is not the same as understanding. The people who help others make sense of AI, teachers especially, need room to teach the question, not just the tool.

Who we're for

Futureproof Festival is for executives, senior professionals, and decision-makers shaping how AI changes organizations, creative practice, and society. Their work depends on judgment, imagination, and responsibility. They want practical understanding, space to question AI's direction, and relationships that help them make consequential choices about what gets built, funded, adopted, commissioned, taught, and governed.

That is who we go looking for. The door is wider than that: students, emerging practitioners, and people still making up their minds belong here too, and the room is better for them.

Business and investment leaders

Founders, executives, board leaders, and investors deciding what their organizations adopt, fund, and build.

Creative and cultural leaders

Studio heads, producers, publishers, creative directors, and artists deciding what gets commissioned and what stays human.

Technology and research leaders

CTOs, AI and product leads, technical founders, and researchers deciding what gets built, deployed, and evaluated.

Public, educational, Indigenous, and community leaders

Public servants, educators, Indigenous and community leaders, and heads of civic institutions shaping policy, learning, and what gets preserved.

BC + AI Ecosystem Association

Founded in Vancouver in 2024, the BC + AI Ecosystem Association has spent 28 months building what AI conversations mostly skip: genuine public participation. It runs the monthly Vancouver AI Meetup, hosts community hackathons, and supports the educators, researchers, and practitioners working at AI's intersections. The festival is where that work puts on better shoes and becomes a gathering with international pull.

Vancouver AI community →BC + AI events →

28 months of community

The community, before the festival.

Vancouver AI Meetups. Ethics community sessions. Data storytelling hackathons at the Space Centre. Community members who keep showing up because the stakes are real and the gathering is not boring.