Vancouver AI Meetup (VAM!), Humanity in an Agentic World
Join us for a strategic salon exploring one of the most critical tensions of our time: human agency vs. autonomous AI systems.
As AI agents begin making decisions for, and sometimes instead of humans, the question is no longer if society will change, but how deeply.
🎙️ Featuring:
Marco Lee – Ex-Engineering Manager at Goodnotes (led AI for 10M+ users)
Felipe Archangelo – Cloud Solutions Architect & Agentic AI Expert
🌟 Opening Segment:
Issam Laradji – Sr Staff Research Scientist at ServiceNow, Adjunct Professor at UBC & Co-Founder of VAM!
Start the day with a rapid-fire pulse check on the evolving capabilities of agentic AI systems, what’s happening right now, and why it matters.
This isn't just a lecture , it's a gathering for builders, engineers, and systems thinkers to examine this shift from the inside.
Come for the debate, stay for the community.
🧠 About the Host:
Helena Vallée is a product strategist focused on systems architecture and human factors in AI. With a background in law, product management, and ethics, she curates VAM! events that turn complexity into clear, actionable insight.
🗓️ Program Schedule:
🌀 11:00 AM – Arrival & Networking
Doors close at 11:15 AM sharp — we’ll be running a focused program and won’t be able to let attendees in after that.
🎙️ 11:30 AM – 11:50 AM – Welcome + Agentic AI Now
with Issam Laradji, VAM! Co-Founder
A fast breakdown of key developments in agentic AI and what’s moving the field today.
🎙️ 11:50 AM – 12:35 PM – Human Agency: Living Consciously in a Machine World with Marco Lee.
Marco brings a deeply human lens to the AI conversation, shaped by years of building privacy-first features for 10M+ users. His talk explores how AI is reshaping parenting, work, and personal identity, and what conscious living really means in a machine-mediated world.
🕛 12:35 PM – 12:45 PM – Break
🎙️ 12:45 PM – 1:30 PM – AI Agents: The Ethics of Automated Decision-Making with Felipe Archangelo.
Felipe designs the systems that make AI run and asks the hard ethical questions behind their deployment. This talk explores how we embed (or ignore) morality in autonomous systems and what ethical intelligence really looks like in an age of artificial agents.
🌀 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM – Open Social
Connect with fellow builders, engineers, and systems thinkers over ideas and conversation.
🫧 Bubblies and light snacks will be served. Looking forward to seeing you! 😊
🐾 Final Notes: The space is not pet-friendly, but service animals are welcome. Bicycles are not allowed inside the building.