Building Agents

AI Sovereignty

About the track

Running your own AI stack became an urgent question after the temporary deprecation of Anthropic’s Mythos, and it remains a poor fit for some organizations. This track covers the whole decision, not just the migration: which workloads are worth moving and which are not; what open-weight licenses actually permit, and where indemnification sits; how to prove capability was not lost, by replaying your own logged traffic against candidate models rather than trusting public benchmarks; and how to choose between self-hosting and a token factory, and where the cost curve genuinely crosses.

We will also cover risks, such as; benchmark contamination, dependence on labs subject to other jurisdictions, serving economics propped up by cheap capital, and the alignment and censorship decisions already baked into weights. Sessions span C-level, legal, platform, and AI/ML, because no single function owns the whole path. It’s built for product leads, AI/ML leads, platform engineering and MLOps teams, ideally with at least one LLM workload in production or in pilot. Attendees leave with a transition plan for their own setup.

Track host

Graham Toppin

Co-Founder, Peerlabs

Graham is a recognized expert in databases, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and computational linguistics, specializing in developing complex distributed systems and Cloud/IoT technologies at the scale of hundreds of millions of users, thousands of nodes.

As a leader, he has held a range of critical roles over the last 30 years, most recently helping to lead Wattpad to a successful exit.

As a technologist, Graham has led teams to many patents and papers, all the while transitioning breakthrough research into innovative products, and holds a number of patents himself in these areas.

He has also been a leadership coach for over a decade, and maintains an unshakeable belief in people – in particular, growing and nurturing high performing, inclusive teams and leaders.


Graham holds a BMath in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Sessions in this track

Friday, November 6th | 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Lairkit: Sovereign Software Forge and Deploys Simplified

Alex Tucker

Software Engineer,

49ops

Friday, November 6th | 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

AI Sovereignty (Panel)

Diederik van Liere

Chief Technology Officer,

Wealthsimple

Friday, November 6th | 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

AI Sovereignty (Panel)

JinSung Kang

Infrastructure Lead,

Royal Bank of Canada

Friday, November 6th | 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

AI Sovereignty (Panel)

Devinder Kumar

Head - ML Systems & Engineering,

TD Bank

Friday, November 6th | 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

AI Sovereignty (Panel)

Kathryn Hume

VP AI Engineering,

Vector Institute

Summit (2 days).

Toronto Summit · Presented by TMLS · Nov 5–6, 2026 · RBC WaterPark Place, TorontoThe people building agents, and the people building with them – one room, on the Toronto waterfront. Two days of practitioner-curated talks on what actually ships: the stack underneath agentic systems, and the products, workflows, and agents teams are running in production right now.

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