Ottawa Chapter: DATE CHANGE | Data and AI Sovereign by Design

Description

Building a Strong and Trusted Foundation for Agents, Models, and Decisions

Most Canadian CIOs are past the "should we do AI" question. The real questions now are sharper: on whose terms, on what foundation, and with what visibility into what the AI is actually doing?

This interactive discussion is structured around three layers that most organizations are navigating in pieces — and rarely all at once.

Infrastructure is where sovereignty starts — and where it usually stops. Data residency, Canadian compute, contractual protections. That's the floor, not the ceiling. Without a unified, trusted data foundation underneath everything else, every layer above it gets shaky.

Context is the layer most implementations skip — and where the real governance advantage is built. Models arrive with general knowledge. What they lack is your organization's discovered knowledge: your terminology, your workflows, your policy interpretation, the regulatory specifics of operating in Canada. Three kinds of context matter: personal, organizational, and market. When all three are present, hallucination drops, explainability improves, and the AI actually behaves as though it understands your mandate.

Application is where value is delivered — agents, analytics, decision-support tools. Every one performs better, and is more defensible to oversight bodies, when the two layers underneath are solid.

No slides. No presentations. Just a structured conversation among peers — to leave with sharper questions than you arrived with!

What You Will Take Away From This Discussion

• A practical three-layer framework — infrastructure, context, application — and the questions worth asking at each layer before committing to a direction
• A sharper vocabulary for the sovereignty conversation: why data residency is the floor, not the ceiling, and what "sovereign by design" actually requires in practice
• Clarity on the context gap — why most AI deployments underperform not because of the model, but because of missing organizational and regulatory context — and what closing that gap looks like
• A way to think about explainability and auditability that satisfies both technical teams and company or  accountability requirements
• Specific questions to bring back to vendors and architects: not just "is our data in Canada?" but whether inference happens here, whether your data is training external models, and whether the system can demonstrate what it knew and why it decided
• Candid peer perspectives from other CIOs on where the real implementation friction is — and where the early wins are being found

Sample discussion questions: https://www.ciocan.ca/sample-discussion-questions-data-and-ai-sovereign-by-design/

Speaker | Chandrashekar LSP - Managing Director, Zoho Canada

Co- Hosts | Ian Bruce - Vice President Sales, Zoho Canada | Sailus Sundaram - Head of Strategy/Product Development, Zoho Canada

About the Speaker:

In most rooms there is the technologist, the account manager, the delivery lead, and the commercial mind. In LSP's world, they must be the same chair.

Architecture, delivery, customer engagement, commercial outcome. Most people pick one. LSP never did. Seasoned enough to know where it breaks. Present enough to fix it.

His focus now is building Zoho for Canada. Outside of that, he's usually somewhere that isn't on the itinerary. Drawn to places that aren't trying to be found.

Agenda

6:00 - 7:00pm – Arrival & Networking Reception

7:00 - 8:00pm – Presentation – Q & A

8:00 - 8:30pm – Networking

Hors d’oeuvres & Beverages to be served

Open to CIOCAN Members & their *Qualified Non-Member Guests (*CIO/CISO/Senior IT Executive in a Leadership role)

Thank you to our sponsor

Zoho is a privately held, bootstrapped technology company that has spent 30 years navigating technological, geopolitical, and economic shifts while staying true to a long-term set of convictions. Serving over a million customers globally, from small businesses to large enterprises, Zoho has built a broad software portfolio by challenging conventional wisdom and competing with some of the largest players in the industry. That journey has shaped how we think about sovereignty, resilience, and the real-world trade-offs leaders face as markets and technologies evolve.