The Future of Creativity: AI & The Artist

What do you get when you cross a VR pioneer, hip-hop concert promoter, brand anarchist, and freestyle futurist? You get Khayyam Wakil—the Saskatoon-born renegade whose entire life is a masterclass in creative surrender, adaptation, and refusing to stay in any one lane for too long.

In this raw and rollicking talk, filmed live at the Vancouver AI Community Meetup, Cay takes us through a 20-year rollercoaster of creative-tech rebellion:

From hacking Carell Draw to designing for Warner Music

From freelancing on a boat in Granville Island to running innovation for the company behind Google Street View

From bottom-of-the-barrel boat breakdowns to Emmy wins, Cannes Lions, and global stage presence

But more than the accolades, Cay shares something deeper: a philosophy of radical surrender—of quitting the systems that don’t serve you, of trusting that the next step will reveal itself, and of building a life one misstep, freestyle, and spontaneous “yes” at a time.

In this electric session, Cay drops:
A hacker’s take on brand building, design survival, and staying weird

The backstory of how a prairie tinkerer landed at the center of immersive tech’s first wave

A soul-punch of insight on why quitting is sacred, and surrender is strategy

A call to action for the next-gen creators to ditch permission, embrace mistakes, and prototype their own path

This isn’t a talk. It’s a transmission. From one of the real ones. Unfiltered, unscripted, unforgettable.

Get in the mix:
→ Vancouver AI Community
→ BC + AI Ecosystem Knowledge Base

This video is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Archive, capturing the wild and wondrous voices shaping British Columbia’s decentralized, art-forward, punk-coded, grassroots AI movement. No suits. Just signal.