Bank of Nova Scotia, Sun Life Financial Inc., Telus Corp., and Toronto-based AI consultant Lightworks have launched a consortium to jointly develop and share artificial intelligence infrastructure, enabling faster, safer, and cheaper AI deployment for each organization.
Consortium Model and Membership
The consortium, announced on Tuesday, allows engineers from the member companies to collaboratively build AI systems that each organization will own and can customize for its specific needs. Other businesses can join by paying a membership fee, gaining access to the combined engineering talent of the founding members.
Laura Money, chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life, said, “We believe that by working together, we can learn from one another and accelerate faster than any one of us could alone. There’s a cost factor there as well.”
Key Project: Agenda Control Plane
The consortium’s flagship project, the Agenda Control Plane, is a unified platform that enables companies to manage multiple AI applications from a single interface. The system is already processing over two trillion AI-generated data points per month for members, allowing them to monitor AI agents, control their behavior, and scale effective solutions.
Hesham Fahmy, chief information officer at Telus, stated, “As we pushed AI deeper across Telus, we kept running into the same fundamental governance and operational management problems that every major regulated institution in Canada is wrestling with. With the AI Consortium, Canada’s largest companies are joining forces to solve these challenges together for the first time.”
Addressing AI Governance Challenges
The consortium aims to resolve common AI governance and operational issues that many large Canadian companies face. Scotiabank’s chief information officer, Tim Clark, noted that the bank had previously attempted to address these challenges alone but found it difficult. He said, “This actually is helping me replace some of the technologies that I was going to try to build or buy myself with a much more sturdy and, I would say, more well-thought-out ecosystem that I can then expand out even further to solve a lot of these different control problems.”
Lightworks chief executive John Painter added that consortium members will retain intellectual property rights to the systems they develop.
Industry Context and Benefits
The initiative comes as Canadian businesses, particularly major banks, increasingly rely on AI to boost productivity and improve earnings. Clark emphasized that the control plane project is something every company will “want and desire and need,” offering a choice between building in-house, leasing from vendors, or joining the consortium to expand according to each firm’s requirements.
“If you look at AI, frankly, and how it has evolved, everybody has moved from pilot through to some level of agent-based workflows. This is the control plane that runs all of that world as it gets more and more complicated,” Clark said.
