A first gathering with a clear purpose
On November 20, 2025, twenty-five stakeholders gathered at KPMG Victoria for the first DAVI roundtable. The participants spanned government, Crown corporations, academia, technology companies, and Indigenous organisations: a cross-section of the people and institutions that make up south Vancouver Island's data and AI community.
The session was conducted under Chatham House rules, meaning participants were free to share information and ideas knowing that no statements would be attributed. This approach consistently unlocks a quality of candour that formal consultations rarely achieve.
What we set out to do
The first roundtable had a specific mandate: map the existing data and AI landscape across the region. That meant going beyond the commonly cited headline statistics (the 620+ companies, the $6 billion in annual revenue, the research institutions) and digging into the underlying architecture of how data actually flows, where it gets stuck, and which organisations are positioned to move things forward.
The founding team had developed six assumptions about the regional ecosystem. Part of the work of this session was to test those assumptions against the direct experience of people who live and work inside the system every day.
What the room surfaced
The conversation confirmed the headline assets and complicated the headline narrative. Yes, the region has remarkable strengths. But those strengths were largely operating in isolation from one another. Data centre capacity existed on one side of the ecosystem; the companies that needed it were on the other, often unaware it was available. Research capabilities at the universities were generating outputs with no clear pathway into commercial application.
Participants also surfaced a dimension of the opportunity that the founding documents had underweighted: the region's strength in data sovereignty and Indigenous data governance. The presence of multiple First Nations with progressive approaches to data stewardship was identified as a genuine differentiator: not just an ethical requirement, but a competitive asset.
The six founding assumptions held up in their broad strokes, but the room added texture. The cluster opportunity was real. The coordination gap was real. And the appetite to close it, at least in that room, was clear.
What moved forward
The session produced a clearer picture of the regional ecosystem than any prior mapping exercise had achieved. It also confirmed that there was sufficient energy and seriousness among key stakeholders to justify a second roundtable with a more focused agenda.
Working groups were not yet formalised at this stage. The purpose of Roundtable 1 was diagnosis, not prescription. That would come next. Read about Roundtable 2 to see where the work went from here.