Prime Minister Mark Carney has assembled a 13-member council to advise Canada on the evolution of its AI strategy.
The news: The Prime Minister’s office announced on Friday afternoon that it has formed a new National Council on Artificial Intelligence to provide what it claims will be independent advice on Canada’s AI transformation.
The council features both public and private stakeholders, including many notable Canadian tech leaders, such as “AI godfather” Yoshua Bengio, former Nvidia lab leader Sanja Fidler, Creative Destruction Lab and Intrepid Growth Partners co-founder Ajay Agrawal, Radical Ventures co-founder Jordan Jacobs, and Mila president and CEO Valérie Pisano.
Also on the council are Canadian Cloudflare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn and former Inovia Capital partner Patrick Pichette, who recently took on the role of CEO in the Government of Canada’s new Digital Transformation Agency.
From the source: “The new National Council on Artificial Intelligence will inform and advise the government on how to most effectively deploy AI in Canada: how to manage the risks, seize the opportunities, and ensure AI is used to improve the lives of all Canadians,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement.
The context: The new AI Council will help guide how Canada’s national AI strategy, released this past June, achieves its goals of accelerating AI adoption, fostering national champions, and building sovereign AI infrastructure.
Other members of the council include CPP Investments president and CEO John Graham, Johns Hopkins AI alignment and governance professor Gillian Hadfield, McKinsey advisor Eric Lamarre, Senator Thomas Pitfield, former national security advisor Jody Thomas, and former National Bank of Canada leader Louis Vachon.
Final thought: Both Agrawal and Pichette were members of Canada’s AI task force, the initial group of stakeholders that advised the formation of the AI strategy. In their recommendations, Agrawal suggested the strategy propose moonshot AI projects to drive the creation of wider-ranging infrastructure, while Pichette said Canada should announce its intent to become the world’s lowest-cost safe data centre infrastructure provider.
Canada’s AI strategy was made with change in mind, and stated that the Government of Canada will review and update its plan “to address the evolving opportunities and challenges presented by AI.”
Feature image courtesy Mark Carney on LinkedIn.