Setting aside the question of how AI will impact the financial advice business, the technology’s potential as a productivity boost for the broad Canadian economy has taken on added urgency this year. Policymakers across the country are looking for every possible lever they can pull to maintain a reasonable level of GDP growth in the midst of a global trade war.
A new report released jointly by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Information Technology and Innovate Foundation (ITIF) says we risk getting in our own way.
“Canada has a choice to make,” write Lawrence Zhang, head of policy for the Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness at ITIF and Daniel Castro, vice-president at ITIF and director of its Center for Data Innovation. “It can capitalize on its groundbreaking research and top-tier AI talent to remain at the forefront of the global AI economy or risk squandering its early advantage by hesitating at the brink of adoption by focusing on regulation instead of deployment.”
The paper, entitled “Canada should harness its AI advantage, not squander it,” makes six recommendations for policymakers:
- Focus on industries where AI can do the most good, but where adoption is happening too slowly.
- Build top-quality data ecosystems and promote shared access nationally.
- Invest in skills training.
- Don’t get in the way of innovation with unnecessary regulation.
- Focus on “evidence-based, post-deployment monitoring.”
- Put AI to work in the public sector.
“In an era when AI will enhance everything from crop yields to cancer detection, the central priority should be to accelerate AI adoption to boost Canada’s economic prosperity and quality of life for its citizens,” write the authors, “not impose roadblocks to innovation with overly precautionary regulation of this emerging technology.”
Count this among the test cases facing government officials who say they’re going to repair Canada’s long-standing economic productivity deficit, and that they really mean it this time.
Access to information
Emily Prince, group head of analytics at LSEG was in Toronto this week talking about how the financial infrastructure and data provider is putting AI to work, despite a lack of alignment among regulators globally.
Her work offers a crisp illustration of AI’s potential, and the concerns raised in the Macdonald-Laurier Institute/ITIF paper.
“I want to be able to provide timely, trusted information to anyone in the world, exactly when they need it,” Prince said. “With the benefit of AI, we can solve for a lot of the inherent problems that made the democratization of that information so much harder.”
LSEG has launched an AI analytics product that allows users to draw information out of the organization’s financial models using natural language inputs.
“These kinds of things are very important,” she said, “not just from an efficiency perspective, but accessibility as well.”
But achieving genuinely global accessibility requires the kind of international standards that are all too rare.
“The more that we can get global alignment, in terms of how regulators think about AI, the more that it creates a framework,” Prince said. “The more variations that we have, the harder it is to have that consistent framework. We tend to end up with a kind of lowest common denominator approach.”
Regulators around the world get that, in her experience. “I don’t think we’re in a situation where regulation is holding us back,” she said.
Do their counterparts in Canada? Stay tuned.