About

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

Name: Futureproof Festival of AI 2026
Start: 2026-10-28T18:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-10-30T22:00:00-07:00
Location: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

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.

Who we're for

AI professionals & researchers

The original community.

Teachers & educators

AI in the classroom, AI for the classroom.

Healthcare workers

Clinicians, researchers, patients.

Citizens

A voice in what's happening to all of us.

Youth & students

Entering an AI-transformed world.

Filmmakers & artists

Creative AI as a practice, not a gimmick.

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.