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Rignam Wangkhang’s father was a pioneer in a new land, and now the son is a pioneer in another new land – the rapidly expanding frontier of artificial intelligence.

In late 2024, Mr. Wangkhang, Artsci’13, was named CBC’s first adviser of AI projects.

“It’s to understand what will work for CBC and our audiences, and to guide our strategy on responsible and ethical use of AI,” he says. “AI has become political now, for better or worse, because of how profoundly the change is happening. Everybody has different stances on what to do right and how we should be resisting or working or collaborating. I feel we should try to find a way to work with it so … we can have some agency and say, ‘Here’s how we would like to use it.’”

His father immigrated to Belleville, Ont., from Tibet (via India) in 1971, one of two Tibetans on the flight. “I don’t know who stepped off the plane first, but there were two guys,” Mr. Wangkhang says.

The family opened a Tibetan restaurant in Belleville and the city’s Tibetan population grew. Through both, Mr. Wangkhang learned the importance of community. He chose Queen’s because it was close to that community, and to his mother (his father died when he was 10). 
“Queen’s was a transformational experience, from the people I met, [and] the professors, to the courses I took to expand my knowledge and understanding of the world … I was very active in clubs and [they] provided me with an understanding of different causes and different issues that people cared about. It allowed me to have more confidence in who I was and what I believed in, and to have that conviction to graduate and take on the world.”

The route from Queen’s to the frontier of AI included internships on Parliament Hill (Parliamentary Friends of Tibet) and with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in India, where he interviewed asylum seekers to determine “whether they met the criteria for refugee status to claim asylum in India.” 

That UN internship, and subsequent work in Toronto with a non-profit working on freedom of expression, were “kind of journalism adjacent … the intersection of politics, creativity, writing.”

He cycled through temporary contracts with the CBC in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, each of them related, in different ways, to the importance of community, including being a community producer in Toronto. 

“It was about understanding different communities across the GTA. It was part editorial, part operational, part community engagement. It was the first job of its kind at CBC, and I was always interested in doing new, cutting-edge things.”

Then CBC posted the opportunity for its first AI adviser. 

“It was just such a force of change for us as humans. As a society, we needed to … understand technology and where it’s going and how we can shape it.

“Being at the public broadcaster, I felt an added responsibility for CBC to be a responsible actor in this space and be able to educate Canadians.”

Mr. Wangkhang and his wife, Tsering Dekyi, recently celebrated the birth of their third child in September. Has being a father added to his motivation?

“Oh, yeah, and to make the world a better place. It felt like a pivotal moment, and I feel like those pivotal moments keep happening.”