The projector washed a soft halo across plywood tables and borrowed chairs at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 8. Laptops clicked. Pens moved. You could feel the kind of attention that shows up when people are building for themselves rather than for a slide deck. Surrey AI number eight did not look like a conference. It looked like a kitchen where the province learns to cook. Eliza and Noah compared study rituals in a tangle of notebooks and phone screenshots. Darren stared at a service desk where the queue sorted itself like it had learned manners. Paul Rex drew a regulatory spine on scrap paper. Michelle Diamond kept her eye on faces and light rather than filters. Matthew moved through the room like a steady drumbeat. He said it flat. “My goal is January 1st. I’m just the hosting curator.” No posturing. Just a date, a role, and a room full of people who understood what it means to ship.
This was not hype. This was a living stack. Classrooms beside clinics beside compliance logs beside loud racks of GPUs. A movement always looks small when it is local. Then you trace the plumbing and see it is a water table under the province.
The Legion is perfect for this work. There is no velvet rope. No brand wall. No swag that will end up in landfill. There is carpet with a memory and a bar with stories and a hall that knows how to hold a crowd without trying to impress it. People filed in at six. The circle formed. Questions stretched across the three hours without feeling like a panel. Tools came out of pockets. Folks traded prompts. Nobody waited for permission.
Attendees introduced themselves in the way that makes sense in a neighbourhood. First names. What hurts at work. What helps in real time. Managed IT. Coaching. Healthcare. Photography. Compliance. Students who do not want to wait for teachers to catch up. Builders who do not want their data to leave the building. The night unfolded in chapters rather than segments. A short talk would bloom into a conversation. An offhand comment would become a plan.
Darren set the tone for useful. He works inside the mess. “AI automatically sorts and prioritizes the tickets,” he said. “AI is built into our ticketing system. Helps with the response. Use AI to do the call recaps. We now have all the internal notes.” None of it sounded like a demo. It sounded like plumbing that finally fit the house. The value was not the label. The value was that a manager could get to the problem before lunch.
Paul Rex brought the cold clarity of medicine. He does not float on metaphors. He names the path. “Software as a medical device looks like it’s picking up a little bit.” He paused like a clinician counting a pulse. “Do your reg first.” Then the line that should be stapled above every console that touches a patient. “Human in the loop.”
Chris came in through tape and text. He had been mining transcripts from coaching calls and could feel his own patterns rise to the surface. “I was able to derive my coaching style.” Then the reminder that keeps research honest. “Correlation is not causation.” The room nodded. Truth does not need a volume knob.
Dean brought a handful of models to the table. He reminded the room that monocultures crack under stress. He spoke about using Chinese LLMs to widen the lens. “Chinese AI is more uncensored. It gives another alternative answers.” Not better. Not worse. Plural. He treated models like instruments in a band rather than a brand to pledge allegiance to.
Michelle watched the faces, the body language, the muscle memory of trust. She lives where images enter the bloodstream of reputation. Her warning landed without theatrics. “It’s not real. Sometimes people find it’s not authentic.” She has seen editors reject portraits that looked good on a phone and fake on a page. “People want to see you win.” They also want to believe the person in the photo is the person who will show up.
Two students shifted the gravity of the conversation. Eliza and Noah spoke in a voice that can only come from doing the work alone at a desk. “Sometimes teachers don’t really teach well, so AI kind of explains it better.” Then the move that every student in the room recognized at once. “We take a picture of the notes and said. Give us questions.” No theory. Just a practice that keeps a brain from drowning the night before an exam.
A builder with data center scars pulled the conversation into steel and heat. “We don’t want our developers to go outside.” His team runs internal assistants on internal knowledge. He talked about Kelowna racks, cooling, insurance, the way a shopping list becomes a fire plan. Prices made the room whistle. “Each of these machines. They can go to like 500,000 million.” Hyperbole and heartbreak live in the same sentence when delivery schedules stretch past a year. Someone said it feels like ordering a Toyota. You pick a model. Then you wait.
The night closed with a slow circle. People named one thing they would try this week. Office hours. A Confluence grounded helper for internal docs. A pilot tutor for one class with rules that everyone could live with. A promise to photograph the work and credit the shooters. Simple moves. None of them required a keynote.
Public school was engineered for a print economy. One voice from the front. One pace for a hundred bodies. One shot at clarity. If you did not understand you learned to nod. The shrug became a study skill. What Eliza and Noah named is a break from that habit. A tool that will keep explaining until your own metaphor shows up. A pocket device that turns a slab of notes into questions and a question into a ladder.
It would be easy to call this disruption. It is simpler than that. It is attention, personalized without apology. A tutor that never tires is not a replacement for a teacher. It is a mirror and a metronome. It tracks where you slipped last month and offers a new door. The win is not a robot in the classroom. The win is more music, more shop, more art, more sport, because routine explanation takes less time and less blood from teachers who already give too much.