Canadian companies excited about AI but slow to adopt it: tech leaders [Video]

The co-founders of two of Canada’s top artificial intelligence firms say companies in the country are buzzing with excitement around the technology but turning that enthusiasm into products and tools takes too long.

Nick Frosst, co-founder of Toronto-based enterprise AI business Cohere, says the pipeline to get AI from an idea to implementation is lengthy.

“A lot of the times when I start to deal with a Canadian company, they say, ‘We’ve got to get an AI strategy. We’ve got to build AI,’” Frosst said at the University of Waterloo’s Tech Horizons Executive Forum in Toronto on Tuesday.

“Then, it takes a long time to get from some high-level room that says we need this thing to an actual implementation that’s sitting in production, saving their employees time or … delighting their users.”

Nicole Janssen, the co-founder of Edmonton-based AI firm AltaML, has had a similar experience.

She estimates it takes 18 months for companies reaching out to her …