Insights
Ollon Expertise
Technology is moving faster than most people have time to follow. Here are some recent thoughts from Chris Ellefson, Founder and CTO of Ollon. He shares both the broader trends and what he’s actually seeing on the ground with clients, from AI policy to partnerships. Many pieces started as LinkedIn posts, adjusted for the site.
Tech Events Roundup
Spring 2026 was a whirlwind of tech events. I went to five of them with the Ollon team. Web Summit in Vancouver, Toronto Tech Week, the AWS Summit in Toronto, Ottawa Innovation Week, and the Peerscale retreat.
Silicon Valley Playbook
At Toronto Tech Week in spring 2026, the Ollon team went to many great events. One of the best was The Silicon Valley Playbook for Canadian Founders, hosted by TechTO.
Canada AI Strategy
In June 2026 Mark Carney unveiled AI for All, Canada's national AI strategy. Five years, more than two billion dollars, aimed at a country that ranks 28th out of 30 advanced economies on AI training and literacy. The two parts that stood out to us at Ollon are sovereignty and the push to increase adoption.
CTO Program Comparison
I have seen posts for a Chief Technology and AI Officer Program at both University of Toronto and University of Waterloo. Both are six months, taught by professors, with a certificate at the end. U of T runs theirs mostly online with a few days on campus. Waterloo's is fully online.
AI Agents and Human Decisions
An agent under testing at OpenAI broke out of its test environment and hacked Hugging Face.
The CLOUD Act and Canadian Software Agencies
The U.S. CLOUD Act, short for the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, passed in 2018, lets American law enforcement reach into data stored overseas by U.S. based companies. That single fact is driving a real shift, companies looking at Canadian software agencies instead of American or offshore ones.
Strategic Partnerships
At Ollon, we treat partnerships as long term investments, not one time deals, built on shared value and mutual growth. We take a Crawl, Walk, Run approach, exploring alignment first, understanding each side's value, then building trust before collaboration scales on its own. Effective partnerships don't start with contracts, they begin with conversations.
