Last week marked the 2018 edition of C2 Montréal, a conference that is rapidly gaining in popularity and notoriety on the world stage. This year’s edition saw over 6500 participants from more than 50 countries, with companies from more than 20 different industries having a presence. The theme, and indeed the name of the conference, comes from the idea of bringing together Commerce and Creativity and getting a glimpse of future trends and opportunities. Having attended the conference, we decided to highlight some of the most prevalent themes that we saw over the three day period.

Social Media

A key topic of the conference was Social Media. Of particular note was the “darker side” of social media with respect to the phenomenon of fake news. Due to the nature of social media in terms of more clicks meaning more money, the emphasis is being shifted away from journalistic ideals of accuracy and unbiasedness, and moving towards using shock value or controversy to drive traffic. Social is one of the biggest trends in the world today, but it will take the buy-in of the masses when it comes to increasing the value of quality content to help it through the growing pains it is experiencing.

Sustainability

Sustainability was another topic which was at the fore of many of the discussions. Discussions ranging from progress being made on initiatives to combat climate change, to how the current financial system needs to be changed to foster sustainable growth, were very informative. Sustainability has become a buzzword in the Financials industry, and unfortunately in many cases any talk or initiatives being undertaken in this domain remain more within the ideas and promises side than on the action side. Stay tuned for a future blog post on this topic.

Artificial Intelligence

In our previous blog post, one of the topics was the increasing application of Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare space. This was a topic that was at the forefront of multiple discussions at C2, and AI’s uses across a variety of industries and businesses were discussed. One topic that was particularly interesting was the exploration of ethical and economic issues that surround AI. The development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to disrupt many industries to the core, and along with that cause massive changes to the labour force. Issues surrounding increased productivity for businesses at the expense of exacerbated social inequality, creating inherent biases within AI (ex. disproportionately benefitting people of a certain social class, ethnicity, gender, etc.), or benefitting certain countries or economies while crippling others all must be addressed. This is another topic which we will likely explore further in a future post.

Cannabis

One last topic that garnered significant interest was the cannabis industry. Many of the top Canadian cannabis companies had a presence at the conference, and industry icon Snoop Dogg was also present and involved with the event. The key takeaway to us was the fact that the industry will be shaped by many more factors than simply recreational use, as increasing evidence of various medicinal uses of cannabis, and by-products of the plant, are starting to emerge. We would go as far as to say that many of the more successful companies in the space may turn out to have more of a focus on the medicinal side of the industry than on the recreational side.

We walked away from C2 Montréal this year extremely impressed with the quality of the conference, and very excited by the insights we gained. This will definitely become a regular annual event for DWM to attend going forward.