The first suggestion—I think this came up in the last session with one of the previous witnesses—is on how we connect our researchers and our start-ups with the customers and the Canadian industry that can use that. I mentioned in my comments that it's not just about financial support. It's not like there are a bunch of companies on the sidelines that are just saying it's a bit too expensive so they're not going to do it. At least in my experience, they honestly don't know where to start. They don't know who's in their field. They don't know who has the expertise they need.
What Scale AI has—and I think it's on a much smaller scale, but I see the CIC being able to do this on a national scale—is expertise on which researchers are working in which area and which start-ups are doing which kind of work. Companies come to us and say, “We want to do AI. Where do we start? Who should I talk to?”, or they come and say they have a plan, and our business experts look at the plan and say the plan is set to fail. When you have companies doing innovation for the first time, you do not want them to fail. You want them to succeed, so they start small and they grow bigger.
The CIC, if it becomes a central clearing house for government funding—and I'm not on the front lines of the CIC, but one of the ideas being floated is that the SIF and others will be brought under one umbrella—then you have an opportunity to be developing expertise in different areas and playing the matchmaking role. One of the honourable members mentioned earlier that it is really about matchmaking. It's about finding the right resources and supporting them.