With Scale AI, Canada is going all in on artificial intelligence, so that it can fully benefit the Canadian economy.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere in the daily lives of Canadians, changing how we live, work, and interact. It may seem like the age of AI came out of nowhere, but the Canadian AI ecosystem has long been growing and innovating. For many Canadian businesses, the productivity and insight gains of AI initiatives have been a well-documented and steadily growing advantage for some time now.
Across a wide array of industries, from agriculture to air transport, food safety to supply chain management, AI has become an integral part of the way Canadian businesses do business. Most Canadian companies are now building robust AI roadmaps to ensure their continued growth. Canada’s AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, with a huge concentration of world-leading researchers, innovators, and service providers collaborating on a day-to-day basis to build AI services and solutions that meet the needs and challenges of Canadian businesses.
“The Canadian AI ecosystem has reached an exciting stage of maturity,” says Julien Billot, CEO of Scale AI, Canada’s AI Global Innovation Cluster. “For years, we’ve been able to build on a robust research foundation, thanks to our national AI institutes and significant governmental investments in this field. Canadian companies need to seize this century’s opportunity by adopting and integrating AI into their processes. The more we can increase the number of concrete applied AI use cases, the more our productivity will improve as a nation, and simultaneously, our local AI product and service providers will shine and grow.”
Leadership for a truly Canadian AI ecosystem
Scale AI was launched in 2018, the same year two Canadian researchers — Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — shared the Turing Award, computing’s highest honour, for their roles in birthing the modern field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Canada is AI’s birthplace, and Scale AI was founded with the sole objective of developing productivity of Canadian companies and building a collaborative AI ecosystem. As a pillar of the Canadian AI industry, Scale AI has fueled this growth by providing Canadian businesses with strategic and financial support, enabling them to solidify their competitive edge while reinforcing Canada’s position as a global leader in AI.
In the short years since its inception, Scale AI has co-invested in over 120 Canadian AI projects across diverse industries for total investments representing $700 million. These investments played a role in helping Canadian companies grow their productivity by de-risking their adoption of AI but also contributed to the growth of AI service providers from coast to coast and the commercialization of AI solutions like that of AlayaCare for the healthcare sector, that of Airudi for managing human resources, or previously unimaginable visualization tools like that of Mappedin.
Eyes on the horizon for Canada’s AI cluster
And all that is just the beginning. Canada has come out of the gates unbelievably strong in this ultra competitive sector, but it would be easy to squander our lead. “As a country, our success hinges on adopting AI, specifically Canadian AI built according to our own standards and best practices,” says Billot. “We must grow our internal demand for Canadian AI to support our incredible pool of local talent and emerging companies. Otherwise, we could find ourselves as a country that has produced two of the three founding fathers of AI, yet miss out on the opportunity to capitalize on these achievements. While foreign AI giants may capture our attention, we believe in supporting our homegrown talent to build a robust Canadian economy powered by AI.”
And it’s working. More than 4,000 participants from over 40 countries recently gathered in Montreal for the second edition of ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI event, to explore what our nation’s leading experts are doing in AI, from those who imagine and define it to those who build and adopt it.
The momentum is there for Canadian AI. In recognition of Canada’s continued global leadership in AI innovation, we have been named Country of the Year at VivaTech 2025 in Paris. This is a big deal, considering that VivaTech is Europe’s largest technology event, with over 165,000 participants from all over the world. It is a unique opportunity to showcase the excellence of Canada’s AI on the international stage.
While foreign AI giants may capture our attention, we believe in supporting our homegrown talent to build a robust Canadian economy powered by AI.
Artificial intelligence is a global phenomenon, and it is here to stay. Canadian AI innovators are especially well-positioned to meet the needs of our businesses and governments, ensuring they find local opportunities to remain competitive in an ever-evolving world. By ensuring that Canadian companies prosper in the emerging AI landscape, we can shape the future of our economy and influence AI worldwide. The future of the Canadian economy depends on AI and the coming year promises acceleration, growth, and international expansion for the builders of that future.
To learn more about the support Scale AI can offer, visit scaleai.ca.
