TORONTO, July 7, 2026 – Lightworks, Scotiabank, Sun Life and TELUS today announced the formation of the AI Consortium, a collaborative initiative to build and govern the critical infrastructure needed for safe, responsible and scalable enterprise artificial intelligence. The consortium brings together some of Canada's largest and most regulated organizations to pool engineering resources, conduct deep research and align interests on mission-critical AI control systems.
Shared Challenges Drive Collaboration
Many core challenges large regulated institutions face when implementing AI are shared, including integrating diverse standards, platforms and technologies, and maintaining governance, oversight and operational control as AI use scales. The consortium enables members to jointly build intellectual property that they would otherwise develop independently, with resulting IP deployed individually and available through perpetual-use and ownership rights.
According to the announcement, the consortium's flagship program, the Agentic Control Plane (ACP), is already running in production in regulated environments. The ACP provides enterprises with the visibility and control needed to manage Agentic AI at scale across models, agents, users and inference pipelines, processing more than two trillion tokens per month across member organizations.
Future Projects Expand Capabilities
Future consortium projects, optional to each member, include an AI Operations Center (AI-OC) to enhance technical and operational awareness for improved performance, resilience and cost management, and an AI Token Exchange (AI-TX) to align collective scale benefits, simplify access to sovereign AI factories and deliver capabilities not feasible for individual institutions alone.
Hesham Fahmy of TELUS, John Painter of Lightworks, Tim Clark of Scotiabank and Laura Money of Sun Life are leading the initiative. The consortium is open to qualifying organizations ready to build enterprise AI at comparable scale and complexity.
Cross-Industry Collaboration for Competitiveness
The launch reflects the growing need for coordinated 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 translate AI innovation and safety into real-world technology outcomes while strengthening Canadian competitiveness.
“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,” said John Painter, Lightworks. “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.”
