AI-cademy 2026: Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Higher Education

AI-cademy 2026: Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Higher Education is a two-day national conference convened by Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA), the Canadian higher-education consultancy. Following the inaugural 2025 summit, this second edition is hosted at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on 9–10 November 2026, in partnership with UBC. It gathers post-secondary leaders to advance thoughtful, imaginative and evidence-based AI practice across the sector.

The framing question is pointed: how do institutions make AI work for higher education in ways that are institutionally sound, ethically defensible and strategically coherent? HESA situates the event against a genuinely global backdrop — from mandatory AI courses abroad and new AI universities, to Western anxieties over academic integrity and contested productivity gains. The aim is to bring institutional leaders together to share emerging practices, compare governance approaches and collectively advance responsible adoption, so that Canadian universities can learn from one another rather than each reinventing the wheel. This is a leadership-and-policy gathering for provosts, vice-presidents, administrators and educators rather than a technical AI conference. Backed by HESA's well-established research and its AI Observatory, and grounded in a national partnership with UBC, AI-cademy 2026 offers Canadian higher-education decision-makers a focused forum on governing and deploying AI on campus.