VANCOUVER — KPMG Canada’s CEO and senior partner Elio Luongo said that while 830 of the Big Four accounting firm’s senior leaders have completed a training program focused on artificial intelligence theory, models and guardrails, the company is still treading carefully with implementing the technology in its workforce. 

“[AI] models can hallucinate,” he said in an interview with The Logic. “That is the challenge: adopting it into your system [and] making sure you’ve got the guardrails and governance over what it can and cannot do. The rule of any initiative you’re setting up is to make sure you don’t over-pivot and over-rely.” 

The CEO spoke on the sidelines of KPMG’s AI summit in downtown Vancouver late Wednesday, where business and public sector leaders discussed how the technology could help address some of Canada’s productivity woes.

KPMG Canada has funnelled millions into AI initiatives, with a focus on education and efficiency, and offers training to all its staff. At the conference, it announced the national rollout of its now $2-million partnership with Microsoft—first launched in Quebec last November—that provides free AI and cybersecurity training for business leaders, alongside a new, bespoke program to help the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade adopt and scale AI. 

In December, KPMG Canada developed and launched its own in-house AI chatbot called Kleo. One-third of staff who use the generative AI tool save three hours of work per week, according to the firm. Luongo said KPMG has additional productivity-focused projects built on AI in the pipeline, though the company declined to provide details on what they’re focused on.

Here’s some other key highlights from the summit:

Keeping it in the 604: Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of Sanctuary AI—the Vancouver-based firm developing the world’s first general-purpose humanoid robot—argued that “almost of all of this neural network stuff started in Canada, which pisses me off, because all of the money is being made somewhere else.” 

Rose highlighted Sanctuary’s partnerships with heavy hitters from Magna to Microsoft and Nvidia, and said he hopes to “keep this thing in Vancouver. [Sanctuary] could be the biggest business in the world someday, and I’d hate to see it move to Seattle.” 

Liberating healthcare: Canada’s health-care system is experiencing huge demand but staring down growing labour constraints. Victoria Lee, CEO of regional health authority Fraser Health, said 80 per cent of its operating costs are spent on humans. She’s interested in exploring the use of AI to “liberate” workers from certain tasks and free up their time to create an improved health-care system focused on wellness and compassion. 

It’s all in the data: “Radical collaboration” was frequently brought up at the conference, which could mean data-sharing solutions between the public and private sectors to drive AI innovation for government services, said Gerri Sinclair, the Vancouver Airport Authority’s interim vice-president of information technology and B.C.’s former innovation commissioner. “No organization … lives in a silo. The sense that my data is valuable, and therefore I’m not going to share it if I don’t get paid, is breaking down the potential to collaborate together.” 

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that one-third of staff who use KPMG’s chatbot save three hours of work per week.