SAVE THE DATE: 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 September 30): $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, 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.
Candice Faktor, HBA ’00, is Co-Founder and CEO of Disco, a venture-backed, human-first, AI-native learning platform helping hundreds of leading organizations build learning programs that deliver real human transformation. She previously helped scale Wattpad to over 120 million users before its acquisition for nearly $1 billion.
An Ivey grad and immigrant to Canada, Candice began her career in management consulting at Monitor Deloitte, then helped build the corporate venture and innovation arm of Canada's largest media company, before founding her own innovation advisory firm focused on disruptive innovation. She is an Ivey AI Fellow, a founding member of Build Canada, and an advisor to Shift Canada and XPrize. She serves as Venture Partner at Lobby Capital, a Series A AI fund based in Silicon Valley, and has served on the boards of two AI companies, Coveo and DreamBox Learning.
She writes on the future of work and AI for Forbes and Fast Company, and speaks worldwide on how to build AI fluency in organizations and the skills needed to thrive in the age of AI. As a mother of two teenagers, she is deeply invested in creating the future we want – using AI for good and unlocking human potential for the next generation.
Closing Keynote: Jacob Ward
Jacob Ward is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of technology, human behavior, and social change. He’s currently reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, writing about cutting-edge innovation and pioneering forms of restraint, and a strategic advisor on the deployment of AI for companies large and small. From 2018 to 2024 he was technology correspondent for NBC News, reporting for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, and MSNBC. He is the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, and was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018.
He is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, and was a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he began writing The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back (Hachette Book Group). The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts, and predicted the AI psychosis in which society is currently mired.
Jacob has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. In addition to hosting documentaries for Nat Geo and Discovery, he’s the host and co-writer of the landmark four-hour PBS television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision-making, behavioral economics, and political manipulation. His weekly podcast The Rip Current covers the big, hidden forces at work in our lives, and he speaks to an audience of more than 250,000 viewers on TikTok, on podcast appearances, and on This Week in Tech, where he’s a regular co-host.