Wednesday November 18, 2026, 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m
LOCATION:
Ivey's Donald K. Johnson Centre
100 King Street W, Suite 129 M5X 1C1,
(Entrance located on Adelaide St. W.)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5X 1C1
TICKET PRICE:
Early Bird (until October 17): $525.00 per ticket | $4000.00 per table of 8
Regular Price: $625.00 per ticket | $4800.00 per table of 8
Some say AI will dull our judgment, narrow our imagination, and quietly erode the wisdom on which leadership depends. Others says that, used well, it will sharpen our thinking, amplify our capacity, and release us to do the work that is most deeply human.
Both arguments are about the tool. Neither is talking about the hand that wields it.
Because this moment is not ultimately a test of technology. It is a test of character.
The AI landscape is a new frontier—part promise, part peril. It is thrilling, unruly, and largely ungoverned — a kind of Wild West alive with possibility, danger, lawlessness, and no shortage of voices claiming mastery over terrain still scarcely travelled. In such a world, capability alone is not enough. AI will optimize faithfully and relentlessly for whatever we ask of it: human flourishing or the blind spots we have yet to confront. It cannot balance justice with compassion. It cannot tell when the right answer is the harder one. That work remains human.
This is not a conference about tools, models, or prompts. It is about the one leadership advantage AI cannot imitate or replace: character. When intelligence is ubiquitous, character is precious. And when intelligence is cheap, character becomes the true cost of leadership.
Hosted by the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership at Ivey Business School, the global home of the science of Character Leadership, this conference draws on more than fifteen years of work with leaders on how character shapes the judgment behind every consequential decision — and, ultimately, the organizations, institutions, and societies those decisions build.
Join us for a day of challenge, insight, and honest reckoning about what it means to lead well in an age of AI-driven change. Together, we will explore how character leadership can make our organizations more—not less—human by asking the questions that matter most: What should be delegated? What must remain human-driven? How do we use this powerful tool without surrendering agency, security, judgment, imagination, or moral clarity?
Because in the end, the defining decisions of this age will be human not technical. They will be character decisions first.
Opening Keynote: Candice Faktor, HBA '00, Co-Founder and CEO, Disco
Human-Flourishing in an AI World: Why Character Becomes the Advantage
For a generation we defined our worth by what we could do. AI is changing that overnight, absorbing the competence half of leadership faster than we expected. What it cannot touch is the other half: judgment, humanity, courage, the character that no model can hold for us. In this talk, Candice Faktor, CEO of Disco and Ivey AI Fellow, makes the case that AI is a character-forcing function. As capability becomes abundant, character becomes the scarce advantage, and human flourishing depends less on competing with machines than on reclaiming the practice that makes us fully human. Drawing on Aristotle, Frankl, and her own work building human-first, AI-native technology, she offers leaders a clear provocation: in an age of infinite capability, the defining act of leadership is deciding what stays human on purpose.
Closing Keynote: Jacob Ward, Author, Technology Correspondent at CNN, Host of PBS's Hacking Your Mind
Weak Perfection: Defending the Best Parts of Being Human
AI makes leaders a tempting offer: faster decisions, fewer errors, and no more entry-level grunt work. Every one of those promises is about removing friction. But friction is where judgment gets built, and where it improves. Technology journalist Jacob Ward, author of The Loop (which warned of these complications a year before ChatGPT arrived), argues that the leaders who matter over the next generation won’t be the ones who optimize the most away. They’ll be the ones who decide what to keep. He draws on the idea of “weak perfection,” which means deliberately preserving the effortful, imperfect parts of human systems, and on his forthcoming book Great Ideas We Should Not Pursue. He examines why an industry run on quarterly cycles and venture money is badly built for decisions with generational consequences. And he asks what practical wisdom looks like when the easiest option is to let the machine choose.
Morning Panel:
Formed, Not Trained: Judgment in an Age of Abundant Intelligence
Panelists: Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services, Anthropic; Bojan Pavlovic, Chief Information and Operations Officer, and Head of Bank AI Tech Enablement, BMO Financial Group; and Mary Crossan, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Ivey Business School
Moderator: Dr. Laurence Mussio, Chair, The Long Run Institute
Every general purpose technology has made one human capacity abundant and quietly repriced another. Steam made power cheap. Electricity made light cheap. The spreadsheet made calculation cheap. Artificial intelligence is now making a certain kind of intelligence abundant, and in doing so it is raising the price of the one thing it cannot manufacture: the judgment to decide what all that intelligence is for.
Machines are trained. Leaders are formed, over a lifetime, in decisions that cost something.
This panel brings three vantage points to the same table: a leader using AI to redesign how work gets done, a steward accountable for that work inside a regulated institution, and a scholar who has spent a career arguing that character is the decisive variable.
They will not agree on everything, and the session will be better for it. They will take a hard look at what "human in the loop" means when the loop runs at machine speed, and at the question underneath: AI can now produce a persuasive essay on humility, an empathetic message, a well reasoned ethical argument. It can imitate character without possessing any. How, then, do we tell the genuine article from a convincing performance, in others and in ourselves?
Afternoon Panel:
Leading What AI Cannot: Creativity, Conviction, and Human Judgment
Panelists: Juan Luis Suárez, Professor, Western University, and Director, The Cultureplex Lab; and David Pickersgill, Senior Outreach Program Leader and Director, Learning & Leadership Development, Barry Wehmiller
Moderator: Seemantini Pathak, Associate Professor, General Management & Strategy, Ivey Business School
Generative AI can draft, remix, and propose. What it cannot do is hold a conviction. Real creativity means backing an idea that might fail because you are convinced it matters, and that takes purpose and a value system no machine has. Leadership works the same way: AI can generate the options, but only a person decides which one is worth standing behind, and answers for it afterward. This panel asks where AI genuinely extends our reach, where leaning on it erodes the judgment it depends on, and what it would take for these tools to help people flourish rather than simply move faster. Underneath all of it sits the character of the person deciding.
Wednesday November 18, 2026, 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m
TICKET PRICE
Early Bird (until October 17): $525.00 per ticket | $4000.00 per table of 8
Regular Price: $625.00 per ticket | $4800.00 per table of 8
REFUND POLICY
The following cancellation and refund policy applies to registrations for Character Leadership in Times of AI-Driven Change:
- On or before November 8: Full refund
- From November 9 to November 15: 50% refund
- On or after November 16: No refund
All cancellation requests must be submitted in writing. Refunds will be processed using the original method of payment where possible.