Telus, Scotiabank, Sun Life and AI technology firm Lightworks on Tuesday announced the launch of the AI Consortium, bringing together some of Canada’s largest regulated organizations to build shared capabilities to develop, govern and scale AI safely and responsibly.
Open to qualifying organizations, the consortium “enables members to pool hands-on engineering, conduct deep research and align interests to jointly build and govern mission-critical AI control systems and intellectual property they would otherwise develop independently, with resulting IP deployed individually and available to members through perpetual-use and ownership rights,” reads a Tuesday press release.
The AI Consortium’s flagship initiative, the Agentic Control Plane (ACP), is already running in production in regulated environments, according to the press release. The ACP provides enterprises with the visibility and control needed to manage agentic AI at scale, across models, agents, users and inference pipelines, the release said, adding “[i]t helps support regulatory compliance, maintain operational control and currently processes more than two trillion tokens per month across member organizations.”
According to the press release, future consortium projects, optional to each member, include: AI Operations Center (AI-OC), “providing enhanced technical and operational awareness across members to improve performance, resilience and cost management”; and AI Token Exchange (AI-TX), “aligning the interests and benefits of collective scale across members, simplifying and expanding access to sovereign AI factories, and delivering capabilities that may not be feasible or efficient for individual institutions to implement alone.”
“This marks the unveiling of a vision built over the last 18 months: uniting some of the world’s largest and most regulated institutions to advance the adoption of AI at scale. The AI Consortium is not only a technical program but a reimagining of how services, integration, intellectual property, and partnership work in the AI era,” said John Painter, founder and CEO of Lightworks, which is the managing founding member of the AI Consortium. “By combining execution across organizations facing the same requirements, we achieve a scale and capabilities beyond what could be done alone. This is the first step of many, and we invite others who share this ambition to help build what comes next, together.”
“Canada’s regulated institutions have been solving the same AI challenges independently for too long — duplicating effort and cost,” said Hesham Fahmy, executive vice president, chief operations officer and chief information officer at Telus. “Through the AI Consortium, we are coming together to develop Canadian-owned AI intellectual property that gives our organizations greater control over our data, operations, and AI capabilities. This is how we own our own destiny and accelerate AI adoption at scale.”
Photo of the AI Consortium’s executive board (from left to right): Hesham Fahmy, EVP, COO and CIO at Telus; John Painter, founder and CEO of Lightworks; Tim Clark, group head and CIO at Scotiabank; and Laura Money, EVP and chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life. Photo courtesy of Lightworks.
