Business Technology Expo Comes to Calgary October 6!

Learn about the driving forces in the supply chain that affect us all in our efforts to plan effectively over the next year, which is set to be challenging. The talk will also cover macro forces which we expect to change the dynamic back towards the end user’s favour and how Canadian users should plan development to take advantage.

• Understand the driving forces behind the chaotic market that exists today
• Know how to plan effectively for upcoming changes and market volatility in the future

Phil is the Channels Leader for Intel in Canada, and has been with the company for 12 years. He has subject matter expertise in AI, modern workspaces and human computer interaction. He has his first degree from the University of Huddersfield (UK) and an MBA from the Henley Business School. Outside work, he volunteers and is passionate about young people’s education and IT skills development, and animal behaviour, where he cares for shelter rescue dogs.

This Tech Brief is a live, high-energy build: we will create a fully working Microsoft Copilot Studio agent in just 20 minutes. You will see the end-to-end agent creation steps: defining a crisp purpose, setting guardrails, grounding the agent in relevant knowledge and testing it live. Attendees will leave with a practical blueprint they can repeat in their own organization to drive immediate value.

• Copilot Studio enables teams to build real AI agents quickly — without heavy custom development or deep coding skills.
• AI agents can be safely integrated into existing Microsoft 365 workflows, data sources and governance models to support real business scenarios.
• Organizations can start small and scale responsibly, using Copilot Studio to drive productivity, automation and employee support with confidence.

Shahab Ahmed is the Manager, Digital Workspace Solutions at CDW Canada, where he leads strategy and solution design across modern workspace solutions including Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio. Shahab is responsible for helping customers modernize how work gets done by combining collaboration, endpoint and AI‑driven productivity solutions into secure, scalable digital workplace experiences. With deep expertise in Microsoft 365, Copilot adoption and low‑code/agentic solutions, Shahab partners closely with sales, services and Microsoft to translate emerging technology into practical business outcomes.

As AI has become the new nervous system for the modern enterprise, this session explores the practical journey from simple generative productivity to complex, agentic workflows. The real competitive edge lies in how efficiently you run it, so we will examine the critical infrastructure fabric required to support these models, how to deploy at scale and why the ultimate goal of AI isn't to replace the human pilot, but to provide the ultimate copilot for organizational intelligence.

• The Shift to Agentic AI: Understand the evolution from chatbots to agents, moving from simple Q&A to autonomous AI systems that execute multistep business processes.
• Infrastructure as a Foundation: Why AI success is inseparable from data readiness and high-performance compute; you cannot build a generative future on legacy "swamp" data.
• The Human-Centric Model: How to bridge the trust gap with employees by positioning AI as a tool for augmentation rather than a replacement for human judgment.
• Governance & Guardrails: Practical strategies for mitigating shadow AI and protecting corporate IP while maintaining the speed of innovation.
• The First 90 Days: A roadmap for moving beyond proof of concepts (PoCs) toward ""pilots of value"" that deliver measurable ROI.

Michael Traves – With 30 years of experience in IT, Michael Traves has a wealth of knowledge based in data management, high availability and disaster recovery. As a Principal Solutions Architect at CDW, Michael focuses on solutions in DevOps and AI. He is deeply engaged in designing and implementing next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, leveraging cutting-edge technologies.

Tarini Bhatnagar – is a Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, where she leads technical customer engagements in Western Canada, helping them with accelerated computing solutions and adopting NVIDIA technology. She holds a Masters in Data Science from University of British Columbia and Earth & Environmental Science from Columbia University. She is actively involved with several organizations to foster a supportive community for women in tech.

This session covers what an AI-ready data foundation looks like in practice on AWS: where organizations find out they aren't ready, what to fix first and how to sequence the work so a first use case reaches production inside a quarter. We'll use the Data Science Hierarchy of Needs to show why tiers can't be skipped, and what separates the AI projects that ship from the ones that die in pilot.

• You can't skip a tier. AI sits on top of a stack that starts with collection, storage and clean, reconciled data. When an AI project fails, the cause usually sits several layers below the model, and nobody catches it until the output is visibly wrong.
• Readiness has a score. A structured assessment across data integration, quality, governance and analytics maturity gives you a defensible picture of where you actually stand, in weeks.
• Cloud migration moves your data. It doesn't make it AI-ready. Getting it governed, reconciled and trustworthy enough to ground a model is separate work with its own budget and timeline. Most organizations discover this after they've declared the migration finished.
• Governance decided up front is what makes AI output defensible later, when a customer, an auditor or a regulator asks how a decision got made. Retrofitting lineage and access control onto a model already in production costs considerably more.
• Prove one business outcome end to end on real data, then industrialize what worked. Platform builds with no consumer waiting for the output tend to stall in committee.

David Ahmann leads Cloud and AI Solutions Architecture at CDW Canada, working with customers across Canada to bridge the gap between emerging technology and business reality. Based in Toronto, he brings over 20 years of experience in strategy, finance, and technology to help organizations achieve tangible business outcomes through the right technology choices.

Shane Lai joined CDW to help reposition the AWS practice into a services-first business. His 25+ year career spans hands-on technical delivery, presales solutions architecture and enterprise sales, giving him a first-hand view of every stage of a customer's journey, including the places it stalls. Shane works with CIOs and line-of-business leaders across Canada on the assessment, migration and modernization work that determines whether an AI program ever leaves pilot.

This session measures Canadian organizations against the five actions governments are urging, using the 2026 CDW Canadian Cybersecurity Study, based on insights from 700 security leaders and fielded independently by IDC Canada. We’ll show where confidence is running ahead of capability, put a readiness check in your hands and walk through a 180-day sequence where nothing waits for a budget cycle.

• An eight-question readiness check you can run internally this week, spanning exposure truth, identity blast radius, containment speed and recovery proof.
• A Canadian benchmark showing how you compare with 700 peers on the five priority actions, including the gap between self-rated maturity (41.4% at Level 3 or higher) and domain reality (62.7% at Level 2 or below on identity.
• A 180-day action plan in 30-day blocks, starting with the one inventory most organizations can’t produce today: non-human and agent identities

Ivo Wiens is the Field Chief Technology Officer, Cybersecurity at CDW Canada. In this role, Ivo drives the strategic direction for cybersecurity, developing services to best protect the Canadian market and fostering strong vendor partnerships. With over 20 years of experience across cybersecurity consulting, pre-sales, managed security services and leadership roles in IT management in both the public and private sectors, Ivo has helped organizations align their security objectives with business goals and is a frequent speaker at CDW and industry events.

Lucas Black is a CISSP-certified Security Services Architect at CDW Canada with more than 15 years of hands-on experience building and delivering enterprise cybersecurity solutions. At CDW, he leads the design and launch of Cisco-based managed security services, partnering with enterprises to adopt next-generation threat detection and response platforms like Cisco XDR. Known for balancing technical depth with strategic vision, Lucas translates complex security architectures into business outcomes that reduce risk and accelerate digital transformation.

This session explores how organizations can build a secure, scalable and AI ready data foundation using Microsoft Fabric as a unifying platform. It will examine how bringing data, analytics, governance and security together helps eliminate silos, strengthen compliance and enable confident AI adoption. Attendees will gain insight into how a modern data foundation simplifies architecture across cloud environments, supports trusted access to data at scale, and balances innovation with risk management and governance for responsible AI outcomes.

• Understand how Microsoft Fabric unifies data, governance and security into a single, scalable platform.
• Learn how to build a secure, AI-ready data foundation that supports analytics, automation and responsible AI adoption.
• See how consolidating data estates reduces complexity, improves compliance and accelerates time-to-value.
• Discover architectural patterns for integrating Fabric with existing cloud ecosystems and data platforms.
• Gain practical guidance on modern data protection, access control and governance frameworks that support enterprise-scale AI initiatives.