Canada’s AI strategy gets the ambition right. Now comes the hard part: focus
Michael Murchison is the founder of Ada. John Ruffolo is the founder of Maverix Private Equity.
Ottawa has finally laid its cards on the table. “AI for All,” the federal government’s new national artificial-intelligence strategy, is a serious, ambitious and genuinely welcome document — and after years of inventing the technology only to lose its fruits to others, that ambition matters.
The strategy is built on three ideas worth defending: trust, opportunity and sovereignty, all tied together by a single organizing goal — adoption. That framing is exactly right. We are the country of Hinton, Bengio and Sutton — and of the next generation they trained: Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, Sanja Fidler, and Jimmy Ba.We are home to a deep bench of AI firms building here. Yet only about 12 per cent of Canadian businesses have meaningfully integrated AI into their work. Among small and medium-sized enterprises, it is closer to 8 per cent. We rank near the bottom of the developed world on AI literacy and trust. We are world-class at invention and middling at use.
“AI for All” stares that gap down. It sets a bold target of 60-per-cent business adoption by 2034, promises free AI literacy for a million students, a public supercomputer, a $200-million health “mission,” and sovereign compute. There is a great deal to like here, and the government deserves credit for both the scope of its vision and its candour about the risks — to jobs, privacy, democracy and our children — that come with it. One blind spot: the strategy speaks almost entirely of digital AI, when the next wave is physical — robotics, autonomous systems, and machines acting in the world.
But is 2034 ambitious enough? …
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