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The Government of Canada is providing $1.3 million to three Saskatchewan businesses to help them invest in artificial intelligence (AI).
The money will go to Ground Truth Agriculture ($586,900), Greenwave Innovations ($425,000), and Offstreet Technology ($300,000) and is funded through PrairiesCan’s Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative.
Eleanor Olszewski, federal minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan), said the investment is about helping companies stay competitive and innovate.
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“These (companies) are really using AI in a transformative way, because here in our country and in the prairie provinces, we’re very good at research into AI,” Olszewski said.
“Now we need to take that research a step forward and actually adopt and commercialize.”
Kyle Folk, founder and CEO of Ground Truth, said the company was created to transform the process of grain grading. Ground Truth uses AI to make grain grading more efficient, accurate, and accessible at the point of delivery.
“This money is huge for us from a commercialization aspect. It allows us to grow beyond the borders of Saskatchewan,” Folk said.
He said Ground Truth built a system that can automate the visual and non-visual process of grain grading.
“Hard red spring wheat, for instance, has 50 to 60 visual characteristics that humans have to assess by looking at it right now, whereas we can do it through AI and have trained models that can identify all of those characteristics,” Folk said.
“Then there are things like protein and moisture, oil content — we use NIR spectroscopy data with AI models to be able to identify, accurately predict, and notify of those values as well.”
Folk also said the technology provides more transparency for producers in assessing the quality of the grain they buy.
Greenwave Innovations is a Regina-based company that aims to help its users conserve energy and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by using performance data.
The $425,000 is earmarked for Greenwave’s energy monitoring platform for commercial and industrial buildings.
Founder and CEO Dean Clark said AI won’t reduce the number of employees at the company, but will instead prioritize and optimize their tasks.
“We have invested significantly in our development, in our AI content, and we’ll continue to,” Clark said.
“We’re hearing from our clients that we’ve really got a groundbreaking product that is different than what exists in the building management space, so we’re going to keep pushing. We’re going to keep investing not only in the product, but also in our sales, marketing and expansion across North America.”
The federal government said that the money will also enable Greenwave to enhance building life, safety systems and proactively identify equipment issues before failure.
Greenwave and Ground Truth are receiving the money in the form of repayable, interest-free loans.
Kyle Smyth, founder and chief technology officer of Offstreet Technology said the money was a great investment to the company’s expansion to the U.S.
Offstreet is a guest and event platform that seeks to help universities, health-care institutions and property managers to streamline parking operations.
“We’re primarily looking to grow with universities and post-secondary institutions, and so this funding is helping us do that through hiring additional people to work on our go-to-market team — whether that’s travelling to trade shows in the U.S., visiting customers, visiting leads and just general marketing spend,” Smyth said.
Smyth said Offstreet’s goal is to capture more of the university market in North America. It works with roughly 65 different universities, while also expanding its offerings to customers.
Smyth said Offstreet’s use of AI allows it to automate reasoning, decision-making and assumptions which allows their partners to make new decisions and manage people and processes.
Olszewski said she understands the concerns people have raised at the possibility of AI taking away jobs, but argued that adopting AI would keep Canada competitive.
“As other companies around the world begin to use AI, we won’t be able to compete unless we’re doing the same,” she said.
“We just can’t have as much productivity as we could otherwise. I think we need to look at it in terms of the fact that that increase in productivity is going to help our businesses grow and that will, in fact, create jobs.
“We need to maybe stop being as afraid of AI as we are. That said, we need to have responsible AI development and I think we need to look at it in terms of opportunities for our businesses.”
Smyth said Offstreet uses cloud providers for its data and most of it is stored in Canada. He said Offstreet is expanding its data offerings into the U.S. on a per-customer basis.
Clark said Greenwave also uses cloud-based platforms in Canada.
“That’s hard for a lot of companies to say. There are lots of applications and things that require data to transverse into the U.S. and then back, but we’re developing all of our own that is collected here. It transverses in Canada and it stays in Canada, where it’s stored and and processed,” Clark said.
Clark said it was the “right thing to do,” saying Greenwave was adamant about maintaining Canadian data sovereignty.
Folk said Ground Truth prefers to use Canadian data centres, but price, speed and accessibility also factor into the company’s decision-making.
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