Companies at the top of Canada’s banking, financial services, and telecommunications industries have teamed up with a startup consultancy to take on their AI infrastructure problems together.
The news: Scotiabank, Sun Life, Telus, and Lightworks announced a new industry group with a straightforward name, The AI Consortium, on Tuesday morning. The group says its members will work together to create solutions for the shared challenges that large, regulated institutions face when implementing AI.
The Consortium’s members will combine their engineering and research efforts to collaborate on building and governing the AI infrastructure and intellectual property they would need to develop on their own anyway. When The Consortium develops IP, all of its members can use and benefit from it.
From the source: Speaking to the Financial Post, Sun Life’s Laura Money compared The AI Consortium to Symcor, which was launched by Canadian banks TD, RBC, and BMO in the 1990s to avoid redundancies in their work to process cheques.
“That consortium was an interesting precedent in Canada since competitors came together to solve a common problem,” she told the Financial Post. “It was the strength of cooperating that really strengthened the industry as a whole.”
Following the thread: Founded last year by CEO John Painter, Toronto-based consultancy Lightworks is the managing founding member of The Consortium. The company secured financing from venture firm Round13 this past February to unite “some of the world’s largest regulated entities” to build standards behind enterprise AI deployment. The Consortium has been built over the last 18 months, according to Painter, and other firms are invited to join.
Final thought: As more and more companies develop enterprise AI agents, the AI Consortium’s first project is an effort to keep tabs on them. The Agentic Control Plane is supposed to help members see and manage how agentic AI is being deployed in their organization. Future Consortium projects include the AI Operations Center, which it said will improve AI performance and cost management, and the AI Token Exchange, which will simplify and expand access to “sovereign AI factories.”
Feature image courtesy Lightworks.