Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today.
My name is Joëlle Pineau. I'm the chief AI officer at Cohere, where I lead the company's product strategy and supervise our research at Cohere Labs. I'm also a professor at McGill University and an academic member of Mila.
I'd like to begin by highlighting the magnitude of the moment we are in.
AI is a fundamental economic shift reminiscent of the massive industrial mobilization of the forties and has rapidly evolved from an academic pursuit into a defining force in national productivity, security and sovereignty, which has taken me from McGill University to being with Cohere today.
Global competition is now nation to nation. Countries are mobilizing defence budgets and strategic investors to back their AI champions. Without actively building sovereign AI capacity, we risk absolute reliance on foreign infrastructure and losing decades of economic benefit.
Canada can anchor its ecosystem with our own values and governance system. Founded in Toronto in 2019, Cohere is Canada's only foundational model lab at global scale today, building large language models that are powering new applications more quickly and cost effectively and placing us among just three other nations—the United States, China and France—with domestic capabilities at this critical layer.
While Canada is a research powerhouse, accounting for 5% of top-tier AI researchers globally, and is leading the G7 in talent growth, we have historically struggled with commercialization.
Canada needs to keep up with its peers. Canada faces a persistent productivity gap, lagging behind some other G7 countries by about 30%. To close this gap, salaries and public services have to improve on a national scale. AI is one concrete way to make a difference. The goal is not only to achieve indirect productivity gains, but also to ensure that Canadian companies capture a significant share of the global revenue generated by this growth.
For our clients, the demand for absolute control over their technology culminates in one vital requirement: digital sovereignty, a central focus of this committee. We view sovereignty as technical guarantees ensuring control, auditability and secure operations. As a trusted sovereign AI partner, our key differentiator is unparalleled deployment, flexibility and security. By deploying our models entirely on premise, customers retain absolute control over their infrastructure and proprietary data without any risk of it even being accessed by Cohere.
Take our partnership with Bell as a concrete example. Cohere's platform is actively running on Bell's AI Fabric to enable secure enterprise-grade AI with complete data control. We're proving that Canadian organizations can adopt AI securely, keeping critical infrastructure within our borders.
Our collaboration with Bell is proof that secure AI deployment nationwide is now possible. To extend this success across the country and address broader challenges related to sovereignty, regulation and labour market disruptions, Canada must take concrete action. To that end, Cohere respectfully submits three recommendations.
First, to ensure data sovereignty, Canada must address infrastructure constraints. Cohere is in favour of a broader national strategy for computing and national AI data infrastructure creation. Key to ensuring sovereignty is having models that reflect Canadian data. If Canada owns and manages the data that defines it, Canadian growth-stage companies and researchers will be able to build world-class, commercially viable models that reflect our language and values rather than relying on foreign infrastructure.
Second, we must adopt a risk-based, sector-specific approach to regulation.
Without a thoughtful regulatory framework, Canada risks falling behind. We urge the government to take a measured and globally consistent approach when focusing on broad policy, while relying on existing sector-specific regulations to manage deployment.
Third, the government must lead by example. The best way to protect workers is not to resist adoption but to steer it.
Ottawa must become the first and best customer of Canadian AI. Setting aggressive public sector adoption goals and launching national upskilling programs will transition our workforce effectively, boost productivity and provide domestic firms with the reference customers need to compete globally.
Cohere is ready to be Canada's partner in sovereign AI.
Thank you for your attention. I would be happy to answer your questions.