FV+AI Meetup #1: Fraser Valley AI Launch

FV+AI launched on September 9, 2026 at Coleman Technologies in Langley. About thirty people filled the room for two hours, and the Fraser Valley went from a plan on the BC + AI communities map to a chapter that actually meets.

The night opened with a full round of introductions, every person saying who they were and how they were showing up. That turned out to be the substance rather than the warm-up, because of the range in the room: a professor with a PhD in AI from SFU sitting near a high school student, a cybersecurity analyst, a financial analyst, a TEDx coach, an IT veteran of eighteen years, and a handful of small business owners.

Dr. Alma Barranco-Mendoza gave the first talk, on her birthday. Thirty years in AI, from an early lung cancer risk assessment system adopted by BC Cancer through to Infogenetica Solutions Ltd., where she is co-founder and CEO/CTO. Her argument was that the hard problem has not moved: data, knowledge, reasoning, decision, action. New tools every few years, same pipeline, and dirty data at the front still means a flawed decision at the back. She left the room with five laws of useful AI: context beats capability, integration beats isolation, workflows beat conversations, outputs beat benchmarks, and humans stay in the architecture. Her closing slide put it as: capability is the starting point, usefulness is the test.

Darren gave the second talk, on the gap between the ninety-eight percent who dabble with AI and the two percent who collaborate with it. His practice: two standing thinking sessions a week, by voice, with the transcript downloaded and fed back in next time so the context compounds. He walked through what that did to his sales pipeline, and finished with a live, unscripted ChatGPT demo driven entirely by the room.

The demo produced the best moment of the night. Asked for a hundred-million-dollar idea, the model proposed an AI institutional memory platform that interviews employees before their knowledge walks out the door, which was almost exactly the advice the evening had opened with an hour earlier. Then it reframed the whole exercise: don't ask AI for a million dollar idea, ask AI for a million dollar problem.

FV+AI now meets the second Wednesday of every month in Langley. Read the full recap in We Told the Room to Record Everything. An Hour Later, the AI Said the Same Thing.