Sun Life, Scotiabank, Telus and Toronto-based technology company Lightworks have formed a Canadian AI consortium to help build compliant AI systems more quickly and cost effectively, the companies jointly announced Tuesday.
The group had been in the works for over a year, said John Painter, founder and CEO at Lightworks.
It started as a project between Lightworks and Telus, but both recognized progress would accelerate significantly if more companies joined, Painter said.
When Painter approached Sun Life, the answer was easy.
“It was immediate,” said Laura Money chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life. “I needed this yesterday.”
Today, the consortium has 30 engineers from all four member companies and processes two trillion pieces of information per month between them.
The diversity of AI platforms and standards makes governance and compliance difficult. The group brings companies together to jointly develop AI systems they would otherwise have had to build separately.
The requirements to safely use AI at scale is highly regulated in financial services, insurance and telecommunications, Painter said. But about 80% of the standards and technologies were the same.
“It made sense to work together,” Painter added.
The group’s first project is an agentic decision-making system that helps companies manage the different AI models and agents they use, Money said. It monitors what AI models are doing in real time, allows staff to check its work and ensure that companies can stop AI processes when they need to.
“It’s like an air traffic control tower for all the different resources in an organization to coordinate and manage them,” Painter said.
Companies are happy to work together on this as there’s no competitive advantage over AI control, Money added. “It’s not a specific advisor support tool, … we’re doing that piece together because it’s a common problem.”
Painter compared what the consortium built to office productivity software.
“You need to have basic capabilities to get anything done,” he said.
Participating companies will share costs, engineering expertise and intellectual property rights to the consortium’s outputs.
Shared ownership of the intellectual property rights gives companies control over AI sovereignty, Painter said. Instead of being forced to continue buying a critical system from a vendor, companies will own them.
There’s no ongoing commitment either. If a member company leaves the consortium, they still retain rights to use the systems they helped develop, Painter added.
There are more projects in the works, such as an AI operations centre that gives member companies technical and operational awareness on AI performance. And the consortium is soliciting membership applications.
“We would love other insurance firms or brokerages to join,” Money said. “I hope this helps accelerate AI use in Canada.”
Read More: A life insurer, bank and telco join forces on AI
