It is both a concern and an opportunity that our AI adoption has been slipping.
I've been asked this a lot. I would say that we're still at the very early stages of understanding AI adoption. There's a huge opportunity in front of us, if we can get this right, to disproportionally benefit from this AI revolution.
I'll remind everyone on the committee that many of the foundational techniques were invented by Canadians, in Canada. Even when I look at generative AI, much of the training of the people who invented LLMs was done in Canada, so we are really at the forefront of AI research.
I would encourage the committee in their study to think about the infrastructure we need to build to fully benefit from this research that's being done. It's true that some countries have moved more quickly than we have—I don't think we can deny that—but we're just at the early stages of this race. It's not lost.
Most industrial sectors have not adopted AI. Even in the tech space, people are trying to figure out how to use AI. The university system at large is very interested in helping build industrial AI ecosystems. We want to deploy our students into the system. We want to understand the kinds of challenges businesses face.
I think this is a good conversation for us to have with all of you about what we can do so that we can more rapidly invent and, just as importantly, adopt AI into society.