Yvette Schmitter
CEO - Co Founder, Fusion Collective. Yvette Schmitter is CEO and co-founder of Fusion Collective, an independent AI governance, audit, and assurance firm built on one principle: the auditor cannot be the vendor. As organizations put AI into the decisions and systems that people depend on, her team is the independent check that proves an AI system is safe to trust and holds it accountable when it acts. Fusion meets each client wherever they are on their technology journey, including AI, from concept to first experiment to full production, and gives leaders the evidence a board, a regulator, and the public can rely on. That work has protected more than two million people and earned Fusion Collective and its Fusion Sentinel platform a 2026 A.I. Awards shortlist for Most Innovative AI Technology, Best Consideration of Ethics and Governance in AI, and AI for Good. Her authority is hard-won. She directed one of the largest cloud migrations in AWS history, served as a Digital Architecture Partner at PwC, and led earlier at Deloitte and Ernst & Young. An ISO 42001 Lead Auditor, she advises the not-for-profits shaping AI regulation with the US Congress and UK Parliament, speaks at TEDx, Black Tech Fest, AfroTech and hosts The Code Breakers Podcast, with work featured in Forbes and The New York Times. At The Tech Festival Canada, she moderates "When Software Starts Talking to Software: MCP, Agents and the Next Wave of Enterprise Automation," with leaders from enterprise AI, healthcare analytics, and consulting delivery. Having built enterprise systems, delivered at the Big 4, and governed AI where a wrong answer costs more than money, she takes that chair from inside all three worlds. She came to ask the hard questions, the ones that separate a confident claim from what actually protects people when a machine decides on their behalf. This is a room where decisions get made, drawing leaders from Canada and around the world. She most wants to meet the ministers and policymakers shaping how their nations build and secure AI, Canada foremost among them, the security leaders responsible for the systems the public depends on, and the enterprise leaders carrying AI into finance, infrastructure, and industry where failure is not an option. “Move fast and break things" works when the stakes are low and the code is running locally on a laptop. When AI makes decisions people depend on, the things that break are people, so independent assurance is how these leaders move fast and keep the public safe. Her vantage was earned early, as a little Black girl who taught herself how to build computers from junkyard scraps on the floor of her bedroom closet, hidden because the world didn’t expect her there. She still finds the clearest view of a system at its margins, and she builds the proof that lets everyone else trust what the machine is about to do.