From the future of gig work to sovereignty: Canadian tech leaders opine

Mellonie Truong & Julia Konefal, co-founding partners & co-directors at Toronto Tech Week, joins BNN Bloomberg to give insight on Toronto Tech Week.

Toronto Tech Week has drawn thousands to the city to participate in 600 events featuring business leaders, politicians and startups.

The buzziest event came Wednesday, when event organizers hosted Homecoming, a one-day conference featuring talks from some of the industry’s biggest names.

Here’s what some of the speakers had to say:

Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s president and chief operating officer

The executive says technology, like artificial intelligence, will create demand for new jobs people haven’t even thought of today.

But he admitted that revolution could endanger some of the work Uber drivers and couriers are already carrying out.

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“I can’t specifically tell you what the 10.5 million people who earn money on Uber today are going to be doing in 15 years, because I think for some period of time there will be more demand for gig economy workers,” Macdonald said.

“But at some point in time, they will decrease, at least the types of jobs being done today and I can’t tell you where all those folks will go.”

The job security of Uber drivers and couriers is particularly at risk because they work for — but are not employed by — ride-hailing companies, who are heavily investing in autonomous driving startups. Uber, for example, has invested in self-driving truck business Waabi, which is based in Toronto.

Asked Wednesday how soon self-driving vehicles could be on the Uber platform in Canada, Macdonald said “soon ... but I don’t have a specific date.”

Tobi Lütke, co-founder and chief executive of Shopify Inc.

The head of the e-commerce software firm says people are worried about what work will look like in the future.

He finds that “funny because it’s such a misunderstanding of how humans work that people think that there’s not going to be enough jobs here.”

“The shape of companies is going to change, absolutely. Companies will be smaller, but there will be vastly more of them, which is amazing,” Lütke said.

Up until now he said, very few companies could afford to hire enough engineers to pursue every idea staff had but that’s changing with AI and other tech.

“Now everyone has a seven out of 10 engineer on their phone right now for $200 a month and that’ll be $20 or $2 a month very soon ... so I think the amount of creativity that can be brought in the world is just so vastly higher,” he said.

The ease of building a business with that technology has some buzzing that a one-person company could generate $1 billion but Lütke says he thinks the concept is “bullshit.”

“Why ... would you not spend some of that money to have someone else around?” he said.

Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere

The artificial intelligence leader said there’s “no way” for Cohere to build its enterprise technology without raising a huge amount of money outside of Canada, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t patriotic.

“We have had to go all over the world to raise the capital that we need to train models, but I don’t think that makes us any less sovereign,” he said.

“In many ways, that has given us roots into the rest of the world.”

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Cohere has long been front and centre in sovereignty conversations because it was born in Canada, remains headquartered in Toronto and last year, signed an agreement to help the federal government build an AI ecosystem and services for the country.

The company announced in April it would merge with German rival Aleph Alpha. The new company will use the Cohere name and be “anchored in” Germany and Canada, if Aleph Alpha shareholders approve the deal.

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Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2026.