Canadian finance and telecommunications businesses join effort to govern agentic AI at scale
Scotiabank has joined three other major Canadian organizations in forming a new industry group aimed at building and governing the technical infrastructure needed to deploy artificial intelligence safely across large, regulated enterprises.
The bank is one of four founding members of the AI Consortium, unveiled this week alongside technology firm Lightworks, insurer Sun Life and telecommunications company TELUS. The initiative brings together some of the country's most heavily regulated institutions to jointly develop capabilities that each would otherwise have had to build on its own.
The group's flagship project, known as the Agentic Control Plane, is already operating in production environments at member organizations. The system is designed to give large enterprises oversight of AI activity across models, agents, users and inference pipelines, supporting compliance and operational control as AI adoption scales. According to the group, the platform now handles more than two trillion tokens of activity each month across its members.
Additional projects under consideration for the consortium include an AI Operations Center intended to give members shared visibility into performance, resilience and cost across their AI systems, and an AI Token Exchange designed to pool members' scale to secure broader and more efficient access to sovereign AI infrastructure.
Tim Clark, global head and chief information officer at Scotiabank, said the collaborative structure reflects the shared risks that come with deploying AI at scale.
"AI is scaling rapidly across our organizations, and with agentic systems, real-time control and monitoring have become essential to manage 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. 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."
Lightworks founder and chief executive John Painter said the consortium had been in development for a year and a half and represents more than a shared technology build.
"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. 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."
Intellectual property developed through the consortium is deployed individually by each member under perpetual-use and ownership rights, rather than held jointly. Organizers say the model is designed to let members pool engineering effort and research while retaining independent control over how the resulting tools are used within their own operations.
The consortium says it remains open to other qualifying organizations operating at comparable scale and regulatory complexity.
Sun Life executive vice-president Laura Money framed the initiative as a way to move AI deployment from pilot projects toward broader use while keeping client interests central to the rollout, saying the Agentic Control Plane would help the insurer's people, processes and workflows deliver faster, more meaningful client experiences as agentic AI becomes more embedded in day-to-day operations.
