Carney pitches AI for All to investors

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney set out his government’s artificial intelligence strategy to global investors yesterday, pledging to give every post-secondary student in the country access to a trusted AI agent.

Speaking at the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, Carney said the AI for All strategy would aim to capture the technology’s potential “across the entire intelligence infrastructure stack: the clean energy that powers it, the compute and cloud that run it, and the frontier AI, quantum, and robotics that will transform our economy.”

He told delegates: “Canadians, some of them in this room, helped develop AI.”

The speech formed part of a wider pitch in which Carney said the government’s goal was “to catalyze $1 trillion of investment in Canada over the next five years, in energy, in transportation, in tech and data, in defence, and beyond.” The figure is in Canadian dollars.

A focus on people

Carney said the strategy was “distinguished by a singular focus on empowering people.” He said the government would build AI literacy across Canada and “help our workers, our businesses, and our government adopt AI to become more productive and efficient.”

He linked the approach to Canada’s social programmes. “We believe in equal access to education, to health care, and to social services,” he said, adding that “those same principles inform our approach to artificial intelligence.”

The strategy was launched on 4 June. In a release from the prime minister’s office, the government said AI for All “targets an additional $200 billion of economic growth to create 250,000 new AI-related jobs over the next five years.”

The same release set a goal to “increase AI adoption from just over 12% to 60% by 2034”, and said the strategy would provide up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work placement opportunities for young Canadians. It said AI literacy would reach one million entry-level post-secondary students.

For businesses, the release said the government would “help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI to support workers, raise productivity, and drive breakthroughs.” On infrastructure, it committed to “build a world-leading public AI supercomputer and invest in sovereign compute and cloud infrastructure.”

At launch, Carney said: “AI is here. The question is whether it will improve the lives of all Canadians or benefit only a few.”

Sovereignty and power

In yesterday’s speech, Carney placed AI within a broader push for what he called strategic autonomy. “Today, strategic autonomy extends to building partnerships in core capabilities across AI, payments, space, critical minerals, and clean energy,” he said.

He argued that combining domestic investment with the strengths of trusted partners abroad would “create greater scale for Canadian companies, greater resilience for our country, and greater opportunities for investors.”

Carney also pointed to energy, saying Canada had “the lowest-cost power in the G7 and the second-lowest-emission power in the OECD”, and said it plans to double its electricity grid. “If you need clean, affordable power, and who doesn’t, Canada is your answer,” he said.

He also said the government’s Defence Industrial Strategy would build on Canadian strengths including AI, cyber, quantum, robotics and autonomous systems, describing these as “dual-use applications that will drive innovation and productivity across the wider economy.”

Alongside the AI measures, Carney announced immediate expensing for most new capital investment, with software, patents and R&D among the assets that qualify.

In the UK, the government recently opened a £100m Sovereign AI procurement competition for British start-ups, while the Tony Blair Institute has warned the UK risks missing the AI boom without a hardware push.

About the author

Paul Jones

Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.

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