Top 10 themes from the 2026 RBC Capital Markets Canadian Private Technology Conference

Research evidence excerpt

Top 10 themes from the 2026 RBC Capital Markets Canadian Private Technology Conference

sed products sold on business

outcomes rather than traditional SaaS subscriptions. Across the conference, AI is no longer a

peripheral tool but a mandatory operational layer. One panelist indicated that AI adoption is

"non-negotiable" internally, with token usage actively measured and employees expected to use

AI agents as a core part of their workflow.

Theme 5: Hardware, power, and physical constraints on AI scaling. Several sessions revealed

that AI's continued scaling faces physical constraints fundamentally different from software

challenges. The AI hardware stack has three layers that are improving at different rates:

processing (growing exponentially), memory (growing much more slowly), and interconnect

(the critical bottleneck). In some cases, expensive GPUs are sitting idle waiting for data

because interconnect cannot keep pace. Power, not capital, was identified as a key fundamental

constraint. Tech companies have historically underestimated how slow it is to deploy power

infrastructure globally and are now coming to terms with power as the binding constraint.

Regarding interconnects, optical delivers the equivalent performance at a fraction of the power

consumption of copper-based solutions. Additionally, optics extend connectivity to tens of

thousands of GPUs, enabling unified compute at scale. For physical AI use cases, edge hardware

with embedded AI chips enables on-device inference without cloud dependency, limiting only a

tiny fraction of data flowing through expensive frontier models.

Theme 6: AI natives claim wins against incumbents. Multiple sessions suggested that AI native

companies are winning competitive bake-offs against established players. For example, an AI