Keynote Speaker

Ajay Agrawal

Economist, Professor

University of Toronto

Rotman School of Management

Ajay is an economist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an academic advisory council member at the Center on Regulation and markets at Brookings in Washington, DC; an advisory board member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society in Pittsburgh; a Fellow at the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California; and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. Ajay conducts research on the economics of innovation and is coauthor of two best-selling books on the economics of artificial intelligence: "Prediction Machines" and "Power & Prediction," both published by Harvard Business Review Press. 

He is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, a not-for-profit program with a mission to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. Startup graduates of the program have created over $30B in equity value to date. Ajay is a co-founder and partner of Intrepid Growth Partners, a growth equity investment fund focused on the commercial application of artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder of Sanctuary that has a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots. Ajay was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2022.

Master of Ceremonies

Eric Lascelles

Managing Director & Chief Economist

RBC Global Asset Management Inc.

Eric is the Managing Director & Chief Economist for RBC Global Asset Management Inc. (RBC GAM). He maintains the firm's global economic forecast and advises its portfolio managers on key themes and risks. Eric is also a member of the RBC Investment Strategy Committee, which is responsible for the firm's global asset mix recommendations.

Eric makes regular presentations both within and outside of RBC GAM. He is also a frequent media commentator on global economic and financial trends, appearing on CNBC, BNN and other networks. Eric's written editorials have appeared in The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

In his two decades as an economist, Eric has also worked as a bank economist for another large financial institution, as a trading floor economist and as a fixed income strategist. He began his career at Statistics Canada. Externally, he serves on the C.D. Howe Institute's Business Cycle Council, the group that dates recessions and other economic turning points in Canada.

Eric holds a graduate degree in Economics from Queen's University as well as a Bachelor of Economics from Princeton University.