A full house at the CPA Québec Info Session! Faculty and students showed up in impressive numbers, eager to learn about the exciting changes coming to the CPA profession.

Meghan Markowski (MMR'25) captures key takeaways from this year's Reshaping the Future of Retail Conference, which brought together over 250 retail leaders, academics, and students at Montreal’s Sofitel Golden Mile on September 26.
The Bay Building on Saint Catherine Street is one of Montreal’s most iconic retail locations. But after the Hudson’s Bay Company dissolved in 2025, is future is unclear. One of the bidders for it is the Cree Nation Trust Fund. Called James Bay Eeyou Corporation, they’re partnering with JHD Real Estate on a $400 million bid that would transform the 134-year-old building into a mixed use development that includes commercial space, housing, a hotel development, and a heritage hub with an Indigenous cultural centre and a museum.
Each year, Stanford University and the academic publishing company Elsevier celebrate the world’s most influential researchers with its top 2% list, which identifies the researchers who are most widely cited in their field. For the third year in a row, Maxime Cohen was among them. The Professor of Retail and Operations Management was recognized for being one of the most cited authors two fields: Business & Management and Operations Research subfields.
The Institut de valorisation des données (IVADO), with support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, has created six new research chairs in artificial intelligence to advance knowledge and train the next generation of AI leaders.
Quebec’s government has made it more difficult for out of province students to attend McGill, increasing tuition fees and requiring that more students speak French at graduation.

According to a report by Quebec researchers studying social inequalities, Quebec’s economy lost $4.2 billion in 2021 due to the ongoing housing crisis — a figure the authors say is likely even higher in 2025.
Manque de logements adéquats : quels coûts sur la prospérité économique? is the first publication in a larger research project conducted by the Observatoire des inégalités du Québec with several partners.
What does it mean to literate in the age of artificial intelligence? According to Kate Arthur (EMBA 2021) , literacy is about more than knowing how to read or write, it’s about having the tools to understand the world around us and our active role in shaping it. Arthur’s own sense of literacy was upended when she was introduced to language of computing. Now an adviser at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, Arthur has been exploring traditional, computing and AI literacies since the early 2000s.
The use of customer service chatbots has grown rapidly. Maybe a little too rapidly, according to Vivek Astvansh, an Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics at McGill Desautels. The worldwide chatbot market has expanded from US$370 million in 2017 to US$2.2 billion last year, but customers are not always satisfied with the service they provide. “When shoppers want sensitive or precise information, they seek human agents, not chatbots,”says Astvansh.
In a bankruptcy filing in late August, the Montreal-based luxury retailer SSENSE cited a liquidity crisis brought on partly by the unpredictable tariff regime in the United States. At the time of the filing, some independent designers who work with the company said they were owed tens of thousands of dollars, but hadn’t been paid in months. But Vivek Astvansh wouldn’t recommend taking legal action.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) programs allow consumers to pay for items in instalments. And the market for these financial products has been growing at a 12% annual rate, and is projected to reach $7.5 billion in 2025. Fintech companies like Afterpay, Flexiti and Sezzle allow users to break down major purchases into more manageeable monthly or quarterly payments.
Stablecoins are a form of digital currency whose value is tied to a physical currency, such as the US dollar or Euro. Stablecoins can be easily moved between countries, avoiding costly banking fees. But whether they will be widely adopted or not is still an open question. The Bank of Canada looked into the possibility of producing a stablecoin, but quietly dropped the project.
McGill Desautels MBA student Kai Zhao (MBA’25) has been recognized by Poets&Quants as one of its “MBAs To Watch” for the Class of 2025.
A former Canadian Armed Forces Logistics Officer, Zhao has distinguished himself at Desautels through his leadership as VP External of the Graduate Student Society, co-captain of the MBA Games team, and organizer of major networking events connecting students with industry professionals. He also launched a free webinar series to help graduates transition smoothly to life and work in Ontario.
If it feels like customer service chatbots are everywhere, it’s because they are. The worldwide chatbot market has grown from US$370 million in 2017 to about US$2.2 billion in 2024. But customers trust human customer service representatives more than they trust AI chatbots, writes Vivek Astvansh, an Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics at McGill Desautels.
The pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs gained momentum in the first half of 2025. And while some institutions are eliminating DEI initiatives, others are rebranding them.