Mirko Bibic is the president and chief executive of BCE Inc. and Bell Canada.
Meeting Canada’s AI moment requires all of us – government, business, academia and entrepreneurs – to bet on Canada. Success demands that businesses embed AI into real operations while policy makers create conditions that reward sovereign innovation. Both matter. Both must move now.
Canada is poised for AI adoption at scale, a shift with the potential to reshape how we work, live and connect. The question is whether we invest in ourselves or let other countries define the rules and reap the rewards.
The federal government has set a clear ambition: Build the strongest economy in the Group of Seven by focusing on competitiveness and productivity. That goal cannot be achieved without AI. The recent budget reinforced this view with a renewed commitment to sovereign AI infrastructure, recognizing its role in powering adoption and global competitiveness.
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But adoption at scale comes with challenges. In an increasingly unstable global environment, AI sovereignty is non-negotiable. Our success as a country cannot depend on the goodwill of others. We must maintain authority over action, over compute, over data movement and storage, and over governance – so no one can turn Canada off.
Protecting sovereignty, however, is only part of the story. There is an economic prize to be won, too. Sovereign AI will drive growth, productivity and competitiveness in key sectors such as finance, health care, agriculture, transportation and beyond. To take advantage, we need to transform technical capability into real economic impact.
The demand signal from business is clear. A recent Harris poll of senior executives at large Canadian firms commissioned by Bell found that three-quarters see AI as a strategic, enterprise-wide priority. A majority say it will be core to their future. Nearly all plan to invest within two years. And, in a world of rising instability, nine in 10 say sensitive data must stay in Canada.
Both government and business understand the stakes. Now we need decisive action to overcome cautious incrementalism and build the AI infrastructure that will power our future.
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Canada has done this before. We overcame vast distances and challenging geography to build the railways, ports and fibre networks that connect our economy today and create prosperity. The next frontier is sovereign AI: infrastructure that keeps data and compute under Canadian control, accelerates productivity, and ensures economic benefits stay here.
What will it take? Three things.
First, infrastructure. Purpose-built AI data centres in Canada, tied to our fastest fibre and wireless networks, with enough scale to support enterprise-level training and inference. These sites must meet clear sovereign standards, so Canadian workloads remain under Canadian jurisdiction.
Second, an ecosystem. Canada’s AI institutes – the Vector Institute in Toronto, Mila – Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute in Edmonton – and hubs such as Simon Fraser University’s Cedar Supercomputing Centre are at the forefront of research. Startups and scale-ups are developing new ideas. This network of researchers and innovators can be a launch pad for Canadian AI leadership, but it must be integrated with industrial actors.
Third, deployment at scale. The global race is no longer about algorithms in labs. It’s about embedding AI into factories, call centres, farms, logistics networks and public services – safely, measurably and at speed. That means turning technical capability into something real: industrialized, practical, repeatable and exportable business outcomes.
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Canadian tech leaders such as Cohere Inc. and Coveo Solutions Inc. are developing world-class AI platforms, but their fastest growth is happening outside of Canada. That should be a wake-up call. If we want Canadian innovation to strengthen Canadian competitiveness, established enterprises must partner with these players to commercialize solutions here at home.
We need an integrated technology supply chain where each layer enriches the next so that data becomes insight, insight becomes action, action becomes a business outcome and those business outcomes lead to economic impact. Industry, academia and startups can build secure, scalable, made-in-Canada AI – strengthening our position and helping Canada compete on the world stage.
If we act with purpose, Canada can lead in the AI economy and ensure the benefits stay here. This is our AI moment. Let’s not let it slip away.