RBCCM Strategic Alternatives - Canada’s AI Potential | Transcript

[00:00:05] Joe Coletti: Welcome back to Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast.

Today, we're bringing you a conversation recorded at the Milken Institute's Canada Dialogue, exploring Canada's growing role in the global AI ecosystem.

You'll first hear from Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, who shares his perspective on the challenges of AI regulation, governance and competition. He's then joined by Canada's Minister of AI, Evan Solomon, and RBC CEO Dave McKay, for a broader discussion on Canada's place in the evolving AI landscape, the opportunities emerging beyond the U.S., and the responsibilities that come with advancing this technology.

Now, let’s dive into the conversation.

[00:00:51] Aidan Gomez: What we need is a process by which to come up with the right regulation, and that should include things like testing of these models in advance, an independent third party that isn't isolated to any one country and isn't dominated by any one industry player. So I'm concerned both on the level of — the technology is powerful, we need oversight and we need to get ahead of any potential risks — but also these big players trying to entrench their power and use regulation as a moat to keep competitors from rising up.

[00:01:24] Susan Li: Dave, since you are building out an artificial intelligence, investing more and more, announcing a $1.4 billion fund, given that you believe innovation is in front of us, do you feel that we have enough guardrails in place to keep this technology safe?

[00:01:39] Dave McKay: No, I don't think we have enough guardrails. In fact, in real time we're spending as much effort building out new capabilities and the product development cycles are accelerating rapidly. At the same time we're scanning our software for vulnerabilities. We're using the most advanced tools, and these most advanced tools, whether it's Mythos and others, are being selectively released outside of the United States. So there is a sovereign issue around accessing the most powerful talent to make sure you're not cyber hacked — powerful capabilities. So as Aidan says, as we look at what is safe AI over time, it's uniform access to the most powerful tools to make sure you can defend your organization at the same time you can lever the tools going forward. So we see a differentiated access. The US firms get selective access to the most powerful tools, whether it's Mythos 5.1 now, and therefore that level playing field can create cyber risks. So I think the world is catching up, and it needs to think about sovereign frontier capabilities and a safe AI ecosystem.

[00:02:46] Susan Li: So you're saying it's an unfair playing advantage then for the US side?

[00:02:50] Dave McKay: Currently, yes, absolutely. There's selective access to the most powerful tools. We combine tools and every company around the world is trying to make sure their software estate is as secure as possible, and therefore you need access to the most advanced tools to not only build product, but also make sure you're cyber safe as a society and as an economy. So it's both.

[00:03:15] Susan Li: Well, minister, what exactly is Canada's position when it comes to AI safety?

[00:03:23] Evan Solomon: Safety is the number one concern, full stop. You got to keep whether you're a bank keeping your customers safe, for us, our citizens. And when we launched our AI strategy, AI for All, it was trust, opportunity, sovereign control. Those are the three pillars. Dave's made a really interesting point. The models are evolving and they're spending a huge amount of money on patching. And this is why I will say,  Aidan's on stage, this is not an accident. We happen to be one of four countries that have frontier model large language models. The US has a bunch. China's got a bunch. France got one, and Canada has one, and it is Cohere. We declared it when we did an MOU with them — a strategic asset for us. We contract with them. RBC has contracted with them. And the question is, we have said we are going to champion our champions. We are going to invest for —

[00:04:19] Susan Li: Well thank god for Aidan and Cohere then.

[00:04:21] Evan Solomon: No, but it's important that we have a Canadian model at the frontier and we're going to make sure that happens.

[00:04:27] Dave McKay: AI can be used for good and it can be used for bad. I don't know how deep it can go before we catch it and stop someone who had a malicious intent to that degree, so I think Aidan would have a much greater knowledge of whether that's real, and we couldn't detect that. What I see on the capability side is we are developing new products and our development cycles are now a fraction of what they used to be. Things that took us two years to build are taking us two months, three months. I mean it's not just coding — we went from coding and getting a 20 to 30% efficiency and generating new code, which is true — I, my nickname was Infinite Loop, and to produce a software code, now I can't go back to that. But it's not just coding, we got the coding efficiency. It's the entire product design life cycle is being compressed significantly. And we just sat down and improved a completely new product from scratch last week, and I was expecting to hear it was going to take two years before we're in market in end of '27, '28. We're in market in early '27 with a complete new build, with everything done. That's just unheard of, and that cycle is going to continue to compress. So when you think about bringing society with us, where I worry more that will we change more jobs than we create? If you start every industry, from sciences, pharmaceuticals, industrial engineering, finance. If you start creating new products and new cycles that fast, and you launch these, you're going to need to pivot people from here to here to manage those. The job creation cycle can accelerate. So you've got both sides of this trying to manage the human effort through this and making sure that society comes with us on this journey, because if society opts out, you see in the United States, communities are opting out of the infrastructure around AI and the power consumption and water usage around these large factories. Well, we don't want society to opt out of all the benefits we can get in life cycle design. So how we bring everyone together, to me, is where a lot of the risk lies.

[00:06:28] Susan Li: Job security is obviously a big risk that we highlight day in and day out. It's probably the most talked about topic when it comes to AI. So from the RBC perspective, they say that 50% of white collar jobs could be erased in a year or two. What are your thoughts?

[00:06:44] Dave McKay: Definitely not in a year or two. They're going to be changed, and you're going to adapt these tools to be a lot more productive in your role. So as we look at deploying this in every aspect of our business, we're thinking about the tasks we can do with an agentic workforce. We're thinking about value chains that we can decompose and recombine around the value chains. So there's different orders. You have kind of three pillars that we're going after this. At the end of the day, we think we can make our teams much more productive. We can create new products, and yet the workforce is going to have to be super flexible about moving from here to here to here and leveraging these tools into your role. But when we do that, we're going to have a much more efficient society with more options, and we're going to move a lot faster. I call it a huge period of pivoting and reimagination, but I don't think it's of destruction.

[00:07:37] Dave McKay: We're reimagining our economy. We're going to grow our economy, we're going to produce new drugs, we're going to teach people differently, we're going to move differently in society. But it's a big reposition. We're going to need more infrastructure to build along different lines. It's a massive pivot, and with these pivots that we've seen in history, they can be disruptive, and if you don't do them well, they lead to conflict. But if you do them well, and maybe slowing down some of this is important to make sure, OK, we're getting out to the front faster, we got to bring an element of our society with us, let's create a safety net to do that so we can pivot. Each country is going to have to judge at what pace it's going and are we bringing a large part of our constituency with us or not.

[00:08:18] Susan Li: New iteration. So from the government side, are there going to be social guardrails when there's disruption to the workforce, Evan?

[00:08:25] Evan Solomon: Yeah, let me just say on the workforce and on the safety. The framework is how do we prepare for this change, right? I mean, government's job is not to figure out what predictive models, right? We’ve got to be here and set up a society that no matter what the change is, we can take advantage of the benefits. We take these safety concerns seriously. Some people say, do you believe it's 10%? These are real concerns. But for us, this whole day today at this summit is about — build or not to build? And should we stop building AI because of the danger or not? It's not build or not to build — it's build right or build wrong. That's it. If you build wrong, you can't get the social license for a data center. If you build wrong, you might get dangers, right, and the risks go up.

[00:09:23] Susan Li: We need to do a better job of talking up Canada because this is the birthplace of generative AI. Aidan, team, Geoff Hinton. We don't do a good enough job of that — making the world know the talent, the expertise, and just the AI innovation taking place in the city.

[00:09:44] Aidan Gomez: Yeah, I mean, we invented it. We invented AI.

[00:09:46] Susan Li: Talk more about it.

[00:09:48] Aidan Gomez: Yeah, I don't know why it's not as well understood. Like people aren't aware that two years ago, the Nobel Prize was given to Geoffrey Hinton and Joshua Bengio, two Canadians who developed everything that we're benefiting from in AI today. I don't think people know that, you know, of course Cohere is founded by a Canadian, but also Anthropic and OpenAI are founded by Canadians. My first day at Google — I was telling this story this morning — my first day at Google, I showed up in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. I had just done my orientation, picked up my laptop, I got my badge, you know, I'm 20 at that point, just out of second year undergrad. And I walk into building 1965, which is where Google Brain was, and Google Brain was like the Bell Labs of AI. It was the best funded, the pinnacle of AI research. I walk in and I walk past the kitchen, and I hear French, Quebecois French. And it's Samy, Samy Bengio, Joshua Bengio's brother, talking to Guillaume about some research project that they're working on. And it just hit me — it was like, oh shit, all of this was built by Canadians. This is our technology, we invented it. Our taxpayers invested in it. Our taxpayers bet on deep learning before, when no one else believed in it, and we created it. We deserve to see part of the upside of this technology. We deserve to have our finger on the trigger of this technology. I really think Canadians should be proud of what we've contributed, and we should fight to ensure that we retain control over how that technology gets deployed and developed on the world stage. The world is going to diversify in terms of who it buys technology from, and so they need a robust supply chain. They can't buy everything from one place anymore. That — we've crossed the Rubicon, that is happening. The question is, who do we diversify onto? At the moment, we're kind of sleepwalking into a reality where there's only one option: it's the US builds AI and China builds AI, and that's your choice. I firmly believe the second rail has to come from a democracy. At the moment, we have Cohere in Canada, and we have Mistral in France. Those are our two shots for the future to ensure there's a democratic second rail. We have to ensure that one of us — I hope Cohere — is the one to provide that rail.

[00:12:19] Susan Li: And because they are who they are, such influential voices, can you leave us with your final thoughts then, Aidan, Dave, Evan, just in terms of what you want the world to know about Canada and the AI industry here?

[00:12:37] Aidan Gomez: Yeah, I think we have all the ingredients we need to build a global champion. Yes, we're one tenth the size of the United States, but they have more than ten players, and so we can absolutely support a global champion. We have all the talent that we need. We have a market that's opening up now and it's betting Canadian much more. The capital is starting to flow in, and we're going to see much more of that this week. And so I think we have all the fundamental ingredients to lead in this technology. It's a core part of our history and it needs to be a core part of our future.

[00:13:07] Susan Li: Dave?

[00:13:08] Dave McKay: I would reinforce everything Aidan just said, but we have been slow to capitalize on the deployment of AI. And we are in a position now to pivot. I think we've got all these great fundamental technologies, frontier models, infrastructure. We've got to integrate this into our businesses, and we have to reimagine value chains and move to the forefront. I think that's critical for our prosperity and that's what we're starting to do in our own shop.

[00:13:34] Susan Li: Evan?

[00:13:34] Evan Solomon: This is the moment. We all sense it. We are in a critical moment for the country, for the world, and Canada's place in the AI moment. We have the best talent here. We have the best innovators here. We are now bringing the capital and the customers here and the compute to innovate here. We've got the natural resources to do it, and it's our moment. We need to capitalize, and Dave said it's a show-me moment. But Canadians are recognizing what we've got, and this week you're seeing the world recognizing. We need to move quick. We need to build right, and together we can do that.

[00:14:15] Susan Li: Well, thank you. It was a privilege for me to moderate this session, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your Milken Institute's Toronto dialogues, and thank you Aidan, Dave, Evan for sharing your thoughts and your time.

[00:14:31] Joe Coletti: You've been listening to Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast. This episode was recorded on September 14, 2026, and originally broadcast on the RBC Disruptors podcast. Subscribe to Strategic Alternatives on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you all next time.