AI Experts “dig into the weeds” of AI
November 24, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) has tremendous potential to increase productivity, boost innovation, and create operational efficiencies, and it promises exciting opportunities for businesses and organizations. But AI poses great challenges to leaders—and is provoking many questions.
The Walter Strategic Forum, organized jointly by Executive Education HEC Montréal and the Centre for Productivity and Prosperity Walter J. Somers Foundation HEC Montréal on October 2, brought together group of business leaders and AI experts to reflect on how businesses and investors should be tackling the challenges of AI. “We are here to dig into the weeds of where people are spending money on AI,” announced moderator Craig Betts, Founder and Director of streaming technology company Solace.
Ajay Agrawal, Economist and Professor specializing in the Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, Co-Author of Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction summed it up in his keynote speech: “This is not like the arrival of Internet or the arrival of mobile technology. As leaders of organizations or businesses, we are working in an environment where nobody knows what’s going on. There’s no playbook for leadership.”
The experts agreed there was a strong sense of urgency among businesses and organizations about AI. “Nobody is backing off from using it, as you have seen in Internet or other technologies. People are rushing into this space like crazy,” said Robert G. Ashe, Director, MSCI and Former Lead Director, Shopify. “They all feel the tsunami is coming,” added Joseph F. Squeri, Investor, CTO, and Fintech Founder. “Everyone knows they have to do something, but they don’t know what to do.”
Here are all the experts and speakers we had the privilege of hearing from during the event:
- Pierre Somers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Walter Group
- Ajay Agrawal, Economist and Professor specializing in the Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, Co-Author of Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction
- Etienne Lacroix, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vention
- Hien Le, Vice President, Healthcare Growth, Cercle
- Isabelle Turcotte, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, ALL IN, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice-President, Ecosystem, Scale AI
- Robert G. Ashe, Director, MSCI and Former Lead Director, Shopify
- Steve Sarracino, Founder and Partner, Activant
- Joseph F. Squeri, Investor, CTO, and Fintech Founder
- Craig Betts, Founder and Director, Solace
- Maxime Fortin, Founding Partner at Squarepoint Capital
- Isabelle Somers, Chair of the Board, Walter Capital Management & Founder, Walter Ventures
Separating prediction from human judgment
Keynote speaker Ajay Agrawal kicked off the event by clarifying the job of AI. “The power of AI is purely in prediction. Only humans have judgment.” Agrawal believes this good news for business. “AI offloads the prediction part so we can do the judgment: that will lead to a variety of new job opportunities.” But in practical terms, businesses face two choices, said Ajay Agrawal. The first involves “inserting” AI into specific problems without affecting the rest of the workflow—such as banks using AI in fraud detection, anti-money laundering, sanction compliance. He calls these, “point solutions” and said business can expect a 20% lift in revenues over a year or two implementing AI this way.
However, the real payoff, Agrawal said, comes when businesses completely rethink the flow of work with AI by “redesigning the factory floor.” He explained: “During the Industrial Revolution many factories resisted converting from steam to electricity. Electricity only became truly profitable when factory owners realized that they had to rethink the factory floor and change the structure of their factories. And entrepreneurs who did that got 500 to 600% lift in productivity.” Agrawal cited examples such as redesigning the taxi business (into Uber) or redesigning medical care by using AI to streamline exchanges of information. “It’s more like Industrial Revolution than a new wave of technology.”
AI tools working together
If there was someone who knew about redesigning the office floor, it was Etienne Lacroix Founder and CEO of Vention. Lacroix’s company is at the forefront of implementing AI tools in industry and supplies thousands of businesses with complete solutions to automate faster and cheaper.
“We build an entire workflow with all the steps on a single platform. Companies can design assembly lines and automated equipment then program and deploy these in the same environment with analytics, tele-operation, and remote support for the machine. It’s a super-simple user experience, like an Apple-like system, where system and software come together.”
AI transforming patient care
Hien Le, Vice President of women’s health AI company Healthcare Growth, Cercle explained how her company was redesigning the factory floor of fertility treatment. Cercle is developing AI tools to predict the success of IVF treatment based on patients’ profiles.
“The tools allow us to evaluate how many times people will have to try, and even determine what kinds of embryos to transfer into patients.” Being able to be this precise about the likelihood of success of IVF allows the company to create individualized price points for their services. “In counselling, this also helps give people a sense of the likelihood of success,” she explained.
The human factor
Hien Le and Etienne Lacroix agreed that the biggest challenges companies they face implementing AI is the human factor—whether that means gaining customer trust or getting buy-in from leaders of organizations to implement AI solutions in the first place.
“With healthcare, workers, employees have to be at the table to help us think through the workflow process,” said Hien Le. “When it comes to AI automation, you need to convince CEOs about the long-term benefits and help them create a structure for the transformation,” said Etienne Lacroix. In short, AI is only helpful to businesses when humans believe in what it is doing.
But are we in an AI bubble?
On the investor side, panellists debated the question of whether we are in the middle of an AI bubble. Opinions differed among the experts gathered—from a hard yes, to a flat no, to a ... maybe. “On the practitioner side we are at a very early and very exciting stage. But at the valuation side, it is hard not to assume the valuations are overstated,” said Robert G. Ashe.
“I would say the first assumptions we make is that everything is fairly valued and as new information comes on line we will guess how the market reacts,” said Maxime Fortin, Founding Partner at Squarepoint Capital.
Where to invest?
Participants disagree about whether it made sense to invest in companies building AI tools, or in the companies who were putting them into practice—in short, in AI infrastructure or in its applications. Joseph F. Squeri said there was great promise in investing in AI tool builders. “There is so much capital being invested in them, the early-stage companies get a plethora of options to build the next generation of software that will redesign the factory floor.”
Steve Sarracino, Founder and Partner at Activant believes in a different approach. “Our view is that you need bats in both places,” he said. But he said he was impressed by companies he could see “redesigning the factory floor,” such as pizza companies that use new apps that predict when customers can order pizza to coordinate this with making dough rise.
How to pick a winner
The panellists also had different perspectives on the question of whether to invest broadly in AI or try to determine which players will become dominant in the industry. Joseph F. Squeri favours focusing on companies where “AI can apply the most advantage in processing data, in industries where it used to be more costly in terms of human labour.” Robert G. Ashe disagreed. “Picking winners, and picking them early, is really important,” he said. “The Internet industry is running on very dominant partners, one who owns 80 to 90 percent of the market share and I expect this to be true of AI in the long run. So, there is a case to be made for picking a winner and picking it early because that’s where the returns are going to be.”
Questions from the audience were varied—and challenging. One participant wondered: “Will AI ever develop the ability to judge, still reserved to humans?” Ajay Agrawal was reassuring in his response. “If we give the machine a goal and give it well-crafted parameters about how to achieve this, then it can learn to do things humans have never done, and make a decision, but it’s still in the service of people who set the goal and the parameters.”
“We didn’t want to provide definitive answers but to light sparks and provoke new ideas,” said Isabelle Somers, Chair of the Board, Walter Capital Management and Founder of Walter Ventures in her concluding comments. “I hope [participants] go away with sharper questions than the ones they came with.” And as Pierre Somers reminded us, “We need to let AI amplify our humanity and not erase it.”
An exclusive event co-hosted with Executive Education HEC Montréal and the Centre for Productivity and Prosperity Walter J. Somers Foundation HEC Montréal.
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