Lightworks, Scotiabank, Sun Life and Telus have joined forces to build and govern mission-critical AI control systems across Canada.

The companies have launched the AI Consortium to jointly build and govern AI infrastructure for use by Canada’s largest regulated organizations, with the initial focus on helping enterprises deploy AI safely and at scale.

The AI Consortium’s first initiative is the Agentic Control Plane (ACP), an AI control system that is already operating in regulated environments and processes more than two trillion tokens per month across member organizations. The platform is designed to provide oversight and governance for agentic AI systems, while future optional projects include an AI operations centre and an AI token exchange to improve performance, resilience and access to sovereign AI infrastructure.

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can autonomously set goals, create step-by-step plans and execute tasks successfully without constant human supervision, according to IBM.

“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, founder and CEO of 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.”

Tim Clark, global head and chief information officer at Scotiabank said that, with AI scaling rapidly across organizations, and with agentic systems, real-time control and monitoring have become essential to managing risk.

“Through the AI Consortium and Agentic Control Plane, we have built a secure foundation prioritizing risk and control up front to ensure that AI is deployed responsibly from the outset,” he said. “Taking this unique, collaborative approach reflects our institutions’ shared commitment to solve common challenges across industries, integrate best-in-class technologies into our most critical systems, and share insights as new risks surface.”

Laura Money, executive vice-president and chief information and technology innovation officer at Sun Life, said the AI Consortium is designed to help the four companies move from experimentation to responsible, production-scale impact.

“As AI and agentic AI become more deeply embedded in how we work, the ACP will help us keep our clients at the centre — strengthening the trust they place in us while empowering our people, processes and workflows to deliver better, faster and more meaningful experiences,” she said.

Hesham Fahmy, executive vice-president, chief operating officer and chief information officer at Telus, said Canada’s regulated institutions have duplicated effort and cost by solving the same AI challenges independently for too long.

“Through the AI Consortium, we are coming together to develop Canadian-owned AI intellectual property that gives our organizations greater control over our data, operations, and AI capabilities,” said Fahmy. “This is how we own our own destiny and accelerate AI adoption at scale.”

The consortium is open to additional qualifying organizations, said the companies.