Sovereign Data and AI Decision Intelligence
About the event
Join us on Tuesday, 29th September 2026 for an AI DevOps Vancouver Meetup on the two questions that decide how far AI can go inside an organization. Who can reach your data. And who makes the call to ship. Two sessions, sponsored by New Value Solutions.
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Sovereign Data Control at the Application Layer
[Sted Chen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sted-chen-3922631/), President of New Value Solutions, takes on a word that gets used loosely and rarely gets defined. Sovereignty is not where data sits. That is data residency. Sovereignty is who can compel access to it, or gain effective control over it, without the owner's ongoing consent. This talk shows how that failure shows up in places engineers already deal with, and makes the case that sovereignty has to be enforced by architecture, since a policy can change and a contract can be overridden by a court, but architecture cannot. If your team is standing up AI systems on data you do not fully control, this is the session to bring your hardest questions to.
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From DevOps Automation to AI Decision Intelligence: The Next Evolution of DevOps
[Cian Whalley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cianwhalley/) joins us remotely for a talk on what happens after the pipeline is already automated. Pipelines answer "can we deploy?" They do not answer "should we deploy?" Once the gates are automated, the bottleneck moves to judgment under signal overload, and that is where AI decision intelligence enters the lifecycle. Cian walks through where it applies: change and IaC risk scored before merge, release gating with live production context, risk-based test and security prioritization, incident context and likely root cause, and intelligent platform self-service. He then draws the line that keeps this safe. Advise, act on low risk, escalate everything else. Humans stay accountable, with policy, audit and approval required for anything with a high blast radius. What changes for DevOps engineers is the shape of the work: less repetitive scripting, more designing the decision models and the platforms that run them. The session closes with a practical adoption path. Start with targeted use cases, measure outcomes, strengthen controls, and use AI to improve delivery quality, efficiency and reliability rather than to produce more code. The takeaway is governed autonomy and continuous intelligence, not autonomous chaos.
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Two talks, one evening, and a room full of people solving these problems right now. Come with the question you have not been able to answer at work.
Logistics
• Time: 6 to 8 p.m. Registration and networking start at 5:15 p.m. • UBC Robson Square, C400/C420 • Sponsored by New Value Solutions.
Seats are limited for this event, so do not miss out! Kindly RSVP only if you plan to attend. And please remember to cancel your reservation if your plans change.
Speaker Bios
Sted Chen is President of New Value Solutions, the Vancouver-based IT and business consulting firm sponsoring this event. New Value Solutions is a full-service IT and business consulting practice headquartered in Vancouver with satellite offices in Seattle, Toronto and Milan, working across Azure, AI, cybersecurity, cloud and strategic advisory. Sted holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, and his career before New Value Solutions ran through Sierra Systems, CGI, TELUS Communications and SoftCare EC Solutions / Open EC Technologies. Cian Whalley is a technology executive with more than 25 years across Fortune 500 companies, hedge funds, government, startups and biotech. He is founding guide at Cognitive Technology Consulting and has served as CTO across several AI companies, including CopperTeams, Athyna Insight and Ganttsy.
