Sovereign Data, AI Decision Intelligence, and the AI-Native Delivery Model

Join us on Tuesday, 29th September 2026 for an AI DevOps Vancouver Meetup on three questions that decide how far AI goes inside an organization. Who can reach your data. Who makes the call to ship. And whether your delivery model has been redesigned for any of it. Three sessions, sponsored by New Value Solutions. \ Sovereign Data Control at the Application Layer Sted Chen, 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. \ From DevOps Automation to AI Decision Intelligence: The Next Evolution of DevOps Cian Whalley 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. 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. \ AI-Native: The Future of Software Delivery Evolving to Avoid Extinction Andre Kaminski closes the evening with the distinction the first two talks both depend on. Most organizations are AI-augmented. A developer drafts code with an assistant, then the work goes through the same review, the same test cycle, the same approval queue. Some are AI-enabled, with the workflow redesigned around AI. Very few are AI-native, where agents are the primary creators and people define intent, supply context, orchestrate the work and validate the result. The talk covers why augmentation amplifies bottlenecks rather than removing them, since coding was rarely the constraint. It covers what changes across the lifecycle when the delivery model itself is redesigned. And it covers where the experience already in the room fits, with concrete transition paths from developer, architect, analyst, product and operations roles into the work an AI-native model creates. Andre is the author of The AI-Native Software Development Lifecycle and an organizer of this meetup. Views expressed are his own. \ Three 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, C400/420 Sponsored by New Value Solutions. Seats are limited for this event, so do not miss out! Kindly RSVP only if you plan to attend in person. 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. Earlier in his career he was a Telecom Solutions Architect at Bell MTS, working on Canada's first live NG9-1-1 deployment, and Director of Architecture leading a 50-plus person architecture and delivery organization at one of the largest sports media franchises in America. He holds a Gold Medal in Computer Science and an MBA in International Finance. Andre Kaminski is the author of The AI-Native Software Development Lifecycle, published in 2025, and an organizer of the AI DevOps Vancouver Meetup. He has spent almost 40 years as a technology executive, and now works with technology leaders on how software delivery changes as AI capabilities mature. Views expressed in his talk are his own.