Speakers

Jackie is Lead Recruiter and one of the founding partners at JRoss Retail Recruiters, Canada’s leading recruiting agency specializing exclusively in retail, with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.  

Jackie first built a highly successful career as a hands on operator with leading retailers across Canada. She then leveraged that experience to personally recruit hundreds of retail professionals. Since starting JRoss Retail Recruiters in 2002 with Rob Fisher, she’s led a cross country team to successfully recruit thousands more, from the Store Manager to the CEO level. 

With her hands on experience as both a retailer, and as a recruiter leading a team of top performing retail recruiters working with leading brands from the executive to field operations levels, Jackie is uniquely positioned to understand the challenges and opportunities involved in recruiting in our “new normal”.

As the Head of AI and Emerging Technology at Canadian Tire, Cari is responsible for using AI as a lever to drive both cultural and digital transformation. With a human centered approach Cari has a successful track record of leading the development and execution of strategy, roadmaps and operating models for Automation and Artificial Intelligence resulting in revenue growth, increased employee engagement and operating efficiencies. Cari is passionate about developing innovative partnerships with start-up communities, research and academic institutions. These partnerships have led to the ideation, shared learnings, research, and development of novel AI products, education development and best practices on the operationalization of building and developing AI responsibly. Her approach to balancing the macro change required for successful adoption of AI with the value that it can generate has resulted in many international speaking engagements and advisory discussions.

Santo Ligotti is the VP of Member Services and Marketing at Retail Council of Canada and brings over 20 years of experience of marketing leadership. Santo began his career in data sciences and progressed to lead B2B/B2C marketing teams across financial, technology and payments industries including companies such as TD Canada Trust, Rogers Communications, CIBC, Moneris and JPMorgan Chase.

In addition, Santo is the President Elect for the  American Marketing Association, Toronto Chapter and teaches part time at George Brown College and York University. Santo holds an undergraduate degree in statistics from McMaster University, a Master’s in Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and an MBA from York University

Steve Mossop is the executive vice-president of Leger’s Vancouver office and leads a team of 20+ researchers in B.C. serving public and private sector clients with full-service market research solutions. 

Most recently, Steve was the president of Insights West, which Leger acquired in late 2021. Insights West offered insights-driven solutions via leading-edge tools and normative databases and had 15+ employees and $3M+ in billings annually in the 10 years it operated. Prior to this, Steve was at Ipsos for 17 years and managed 30+ client service staff in multiple cities after starting his career at the Angus Reid Group and TNS. 

Steve has released over 700+ public opinion polls on politics; topics from bridge tolls to bike lanes; support or opposition to environmental, social and policy issues; employee satisfaction; social media habits and COVID-19 impacts. He has correctly predicted the outcomes of over 25 elections over his career. 

His accomplishments include launching Insights West to be the fastest-growing B.C. market research company, winning Business in Vancouver’s Top 40 Under 40 award in 2006, and winning BCAMA’s 2001 Marketer of the Year Award. Steve was chair of the BCAMA’s Senior Executive Program for 4 years and was a member of Vancouver EO for 5 years. 

Steve is a frequent public speaker and media personality in British Columbia, making regular appearances on a wide variety of media outlets as the spokesperson for Leger and in the past for Insights West and Ipsos. Steve holds a BBA degree from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in marketing.

Michael is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. He has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions with C-level executives and participated on thought leadership panels worldwide.

Michael is also the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts, including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus the Remarkable Retail with author Steve Dennis, Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, all available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and all major podcast platforms.