Bank of Nova Scotia is teaming up with three other companies to build and share infrastructure related to artificial intelligence in order to help them deploy the technology faster, more safely and at a lower cost.
Scotiabank, Sun Life Financial Inc., Telus Corp. and Toronto-based AI consultant Lightworks launched a consortium on Tuesday that will allow their engineers to jointly develop AI systems that each organization will own and can tailor to their needs.
"We believe that by working together, we can learn from one another and accelerate faster than any one of us could alone," Laura Money, chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life, said. "There's a cost factor there as well."
The consortium is based on a "first-of-its-kind" model, the companies say, as businesses look for ways to use AI to boost productivity. Canada's biggest banks in recent quarters have been highlighting how AI is helping them save time and resources and they're also banking on it to improve their earnings.
The group's key project, the Agenda Control Plane, helps companies control the different AI applications they use on one platform. The system is already being used to handle more than two trillion pieces of AI-generated data each month for its members, allowing them to see what their AI agents are doing, control how they behave and scale what's working.
Hesham Fahmy, chief information officer at Telus, said the defining challenge in AI is no longer building the technology, but controlling and governing it at scale.
"As we pushed AI deeper across Telus, we kept running into the same fundamental governance and operational management problems that every major regulated institution in Canada is wrestling with," he said. "With the AI Consortium, Canada's largest companies are joining forces to solve these challenges together for the first time."
Scotiabank's chief information officer, Tim Clark, said the lender has made some attempts to resolve such challenges, but found it difficult.
"This actually is helping me replace some of the technologies that I was going to try to build or buy myself with a much more sturdy and, I would say, more well-thought-out ecosystem that I can then expand out even further to solve a lot of these different control problems," he said.
The members of the consortium will also own the intellectual property of the systems that they are creating, Lightworks chief executive John Painter said.
Other businesses can also be a part of the new consortium by paying a membership fee, he said, giving them access to all the engineering talent that the companies have, which is quite substantial.