Lightworks, Scotiabank, Sun Life and TELUS have announced the launch of the AI Consortium, a trailblazing model bringing together some of Canada’s largest and most regulated organizations to build and govern the critical infrastructure needed to implement artificial intelligence (AI) safely, responsibly and at enterprise scale.
Many of the core challenges large, regulated institutions face when implementing AI are shared, from integrating diverse standards, platforms and technologies to maintaining governance, oversight and operational control as AI use scales.
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.
The AI Consortium’s flagship program, the Agentic Control Plane (ACP), is already running in production in regulated environments. The ACP gives enterprises the visibility and control needed to manage Agentic AI at scale, across models, agents, users and inference pipelines. It helps support regulatory compliance, maintain operational control and currently processes more than two trillion tokens per month across member organizations.
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.
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.
The launch reflects the growing need for coordinated approaches to
AI adoption in complex, regulated environments. By bringing together major institutions from banking, telecommunications and insurance, the AI Consortium demonstrates how cross-industry collaboration can help translate AI innovation and safety into real-world technology outcomes while strengthening Canadian competitiveness. The Consortium is open to qualifying organizations ready to build the future of enterprise AI at comparable scale and complexity.
“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. 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,” said, – John Painter, Founder and CEO of Lightworks.
“AI is scaling rapidly across our organizations, and with agentic systems, real-time control and monitoring have become essential to manage risk. Through the AI Consortium and Agentic Control Plane, we have built a secure foundation prioritizing risk and control up front to ensure that AI is deployed responsibly from the outset. Taking this unique, collaborative approach reflects our institutions’ shared commitment to solve common challenges across industries, integrate best-in-class technologies into our most critical systems, and share insights as new risks surface,” commented, Tim Clark, Global Head and CIO, Scotiabank.
“The opportunity of the AI Consortium is to help us move from experimentation to responsible, production-scale impact. As AI and Agentic AI become more deeply embedded in how we work, the ACP will help us keep our Clients at the centre — strengthening the trust they place in us while empowering our people, processes and workflows to deliver better, faster and more meaningful experiences,” said, Laura Money, Executive Vice-President and Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer, Sun Life.
“Canada’s regulated institutions have been solving the same AI challenges independently for too long – duplicating effort and cost. 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,” commented, Hesham Fahmy, EVP, COO and CIO, TELUS.
