The Era of Being Believed: 15 of Toronto’s Top Tech Creators Gather as Trust Becomes the New Moat
ActiVibe AI’s first Toronto Tech Creators Circle — 15 creators, 1M+ reach — on what still earns trust when AI can produce anything.
TORONTO, ON – October 24, 2026 – AI made building products nearly free. Anyone can build now. Who decides what wins the attention of the people you’re trying to reach?
The answer is a creator people already follow.
15 of Canada’s top-tier tech creators sat together on October 24, at ActiVibe AI’s first Tech Creators Circle at the Ace Hotel. ActiVibe AI, a San Francisco-based, UpHonest Capital-backed creator-led growth platform gathered them around one table to talk about the hardest part of tech right now: getting found, and getting believed. Trust, not technology, is the new oil.
Because what’s scarce has changed. It’s no longer the ability to build, it’s the ability to distribute knowledge to the right people and be believed. The most valuable AI skill isn’t coding anymore; it’s distribution. And as synthetic content floods every feed, some forecasts put AI-generated content at up to 90% of what we see online, authenticity has become the last true premium. Winning the feed now means winning trust.
Tech creators aren’t just engineers. Around the table sat inspiring founders like Matt Shoss(@mattshoss), Sonia Couto (@soniactech); as well as engineers, investors, educators, and artists. That breadth is part of why people trust them: they’ve lived the work.
This is the shift behind what’s becoming known as the Casting Era. As feeds fill with synthetic content, top brands have stopped buying reach and started casting talent, creators are being reevaluated from media channels to talent. Distribution beats capital. And the moat has moved: product features get copied in weeks, while trust compounds over years. The relationship is the moat.
The creators at the table have worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Wealthsimple, and other international tech companies. Sophie (@sophii.svg): “AI can help you work faster, but it can’t give you years of expertise. That’s what people come to you for.” Nandini Shukla (@techwithnandini.ai) builds her content around followers’ real questions, in feeds full of automated posts, that two-way exchange turns an audience into a community that trusts her.
That’s what ActiVibe AI was built around. “People still decide what to try based on who they trust,” said Sasha Pan, Founder and CEO. “Tech creators earn that trust through real expertise. Toronto has one of the strongest creator communities in North America, it deserved a room of its own.” The founders who win, she adds, build their audience before their product.
The night also featured two artists working where technology meets craft. Maro Vardanyan (@ProofofMaro), featured by TechCrunch, presented wearables made from recycled Raspberry Pi boards and spoke about the women who hand-wove memory for early computers. Moth (@backlineguitar), master luthier and recording artist, showcased his blockchain-connected guitars.
As one creator put it: trust is the one metric an algorithm can’t hallucinate. Tech Creators Circle launched in San Francisco earlier this year; Toronto is the first stop in Canada. Tech creators can join the community and roster at activibe.ai/creators.
