Description

Visit: www.victoriatechweekpanel.com for the most up to date information and sign up.

Four Gen Z founders on how their generation is actually using AI to build companies. What four people have running right now, what it took to get working, and what broke on the way.

Everyone on this panel is building with AI in their own work, and all of them came at it from a different direction. Between them: a $45,000 federally funded Mitacs Accelerate research project at the University of Victoria asking whether a product business can be run mostly autonomously, the AI voice agent now handling 80% of inbound patient calls at a Nasdaq listed healthcare company, creator programs run for some of the biggest names in B2B tech, and one of Victoria's highest rated service brands built from nothing at 20.

What you'll learn:

• Olivia Wein, Isla Lune: whether a product business can be run mostly autonomously. The playground she built for her AI agents in Claude Code, the shared memory they all read from, the auto-poster that runs itself on one final check from her and pulled a thousand Threads followers and 350,000 views in a week, and the parts that still will not run without a person.

• Muhammad Aarij, UVic Entrepreneurship Club: how you get an organisation to actually adopt AI, from someone who designed a healthcare AI product now live in production without writing a line of its code.

• Tara Crymble, Creatorbuzz: what the brands hiring creators look like now that so many of them are AI companies, seen from inside a B2B influencer agency.

• Samuel Games, Victoria Builds: what building young in this city actually takes, from someone who built a top rated brand at 20 and now runs the room where Victoria's young founders meet.

What you'll experience:

• A panel, then open audience questions, then time to talk to everyone in the room.

• Victoria's tech and founder community in one place: Victoria Builds, the UVic Entrepreneurship Club, Intros, Frontier, and everyone Tech Week brings out.

Olivia Wein graduated in November 2025 as the Sole Convocation Honoree for the BCom Class of 2025 at UVic's Gustavson School of Business. She aims to run Isla Lune's entire marketing operation on AI agents she built herself with no engineering background. Her $45,000 Mitacs Accelerate research project at the University of Victoria, supervised by Dr. Brock Smith, asks whether a product business can be run mostly autonomously, and Isla Lune is what she is testing it on. She will show what that looks like in practice: the playground she built for the agents using Claude Code, Google for Startups and HyperAgent Founding 500 credits, the shared memory underneath it, which she calls "the Brain", holding over 7,000 facts and more than 1,000 people and companies that every agent reads before it acts, the roughly 90 services running on top, and the parts that still will not work without a person. One of those agents is a Threads auto-poster she built that writes, learns from its own results and posts autonomously with one final check from her, which pulled a thousand followers and 350,000 views in its first week. She is a League of Innovators Accelerator alum, was approved for the Google for Startups Cloud Program, and is one of 500 founders worldwide chosen for HyperAgent's Founding 500, the $10 million programme run by Airtable cofounder Howie Liu for people building agent-first companies. She has also built and shipped an iOS app on her own. $62,000 in non-dilutive funding, Drop 1 sold out in 10 days, and nominated by UVic for Douglas Magazine's Victoria 10 to Watch 2026.

Muhammad Aarij is finishing a Master of Applied Data Science at the University of Victoria and is President of the UVic Entrepreneurship Club. At CareCloud, a Nasdaq listed healthcare company serving over 45,000 providers, he was handed a blank page and asked what an AI voice agent for healthcare should look like. He named it Stratus, and it is now the company's flagship AI product, live in production and handling 80% of inbound patient calls at the practices using it. He did not write the code. Before Canada he built and sold two food brands, scaling one past a million rupees a month, and gave a TEDx talk, Shifting Perspective, as the youngest speaker on the panel. He is currently mapping the Canadian job market using knowledge graphs and vector embeddings. His question is the one he thinks matters most in AI right now: not what can we build, but how do we get real organisations to actually use it.

Tara Crymble is an Account Manager at Creatorbuzz, one of the leading agencies in B2B influencer marketing, running creator programs for some of the biggest names in B2B tech. She writes about the creator economy to an audience of over 4,700 on LinkedIn, where her posts regularly pass a thousand reactions. She founded Intros after noticing nobody had properly introduced Victoria's creators to Victoria's businesses. The first night sent a creator home with a paid gig, got a newly launched app real feedback, and put a restaurant owner in front of a filmmaker. 

Owen Works is MCing, and hosting. He founded Dopa, which runs gamified wellness challenges for communities and causes and handles alumni engagement for recovery centres, and Frontier, the new Victoria coworking space this is happening in. An industrial engineer by training and, like Olivia, a League of Innovators alum, he runs founder meetups across the city.

Samuel Games built Canine Car Care into one of Victoria's highest rated detailing brands at 20, on 160+ five star reviews and Meta ads. He hosts the Reject Mediocrity podcast, with guests like Andrew Wilkinson. He runs Victoria Builds, where Victoria's young founders meet for monthly dinners, hikes and coworking, now expanding to Vancouver and recently surpassed 100 members.

The format is a panel, then audience questions, then time to talk to everyone in the room. Free to attend, and built for Victoria's tech and founder community: people building companies, building with AI, or working out where to start.

Co-hosted by Dopa, Isla Lune and the UVic Entrepreneurship Club, at Frontier, 1021 Government St.

Register: www.victoriatechweekpanel.com 

Contact: Olivia Wein, olivia@islalune.ca