Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) announced late Tuesday an initial investment of up to $25 million CAD over three years to support AI development and adoption across its operations.
That money will fund a strategic collaboration between TD’s AI research centre, Layer 6, and Toronto-based large language model (LLM) developer Cohere.
Canada’s second-largest bank says this partnership will explore how Cohere’s secure enterprise AI models could be applied within TD to improve productivity, decision-making, and client experience, as the two firms work alongside each other at MaRS Discovery District. This work will span AI agents and enhanced workflows.
“Cohere was founded in Canada with a mission to help enterprises and governments adopt AI securely and effectively,” Cohere CFO François Chadwick said in a statement. “We’re excited to collaborate with the bank’s Layer 6 team to explore practical applications of enterprise AI.”
This promise follows TD’s $150-billion commitment last week to financing AI and other sectors critical to Canada’s economic future.
Chadwick and Rizwan Khalfan, TD’s executive vice-president and vice chair of strategic growth, innovation and partnerships, spoke about the collaboration on stage Tuesday evening at the recently rebranded Nrth Festival in Toronto. Khalfan said the opportunity for TD and Cohere is “immense,” arguing that Canada needs more domestic partnerships.
“We are Canadians,” Khalfan said. “We can come together. We can partner with each other, push each other to go to new levels, and this I hope serves as a really good example for the rest of the industry.”
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Khalfan joked that five years ago, he met with Cohere’s founders and “didn’t understand” what they were doing. Today, he has a clearer sense of the company’s potential, noting that recent advances in AI have made it possible to anticipate customer needs, empower them to take actions themselves, or equip agents to act on their behalf.
Chadwick noted that over the past six to 12 months, he has had more CFO to CFO conversations about AI return on investment and the tech’s capacity to drive increased productivity and sales in addition to operational efficiency. He argued that companies must invest in using this tech to transform their businesses at scale.
TD has been investing heavily in AI for years. The bank acquired Layer 6 in 2019 and turned the AI company into its AI research centre. The bank is also an indirect investor in Cohere through its limited partner stakes in Toronto venture capital firm Radical Ventures, and has tested Cohere’s models for years.
Feature image courtesy Cohere.