Prime Minister Mark Carney has named some of Canada’s most prominent AI researchers and investors to a small group that will advise the federal government on the roll-out of its national AI strategy and safety issues around the technology.

The members of the 13-person National Council on Artificial Intelligence include LawZero scientific director Yoshua Bengio, who frequently counsels policymakers around the world on AI issues, as well as Veeda AI CEO Sanja Fidler, who is developing models to control physical AI. 

The Prime Minister’s Office said the new council will advise Carney and the federal government on issues including economic competitiveness, AI uptake, digital infrastructure and AI research, as well as the role the technology can play within the public service. Patrick Pichette, the former venture capitalist and tech executive recently named CEO of new federal agency Digital Transformation Canada, is among the members.

Ottawa launched an updated national AI strategy in June, setting a lofty target of increasing business adoption from 12 per cent to 60 per cent by 2034, and pledging hundreds of millions of dollars for startups developing the technology and firms deploying it. 

Other members of the new advisory council include Jordan Jacobs, managing partner of Toronto-based Radical Ventures, which is raising a US$4-billion late-stage fund and was an early investor in major Canadian AI startups including Cohere and Waabi. Another member is John Graham, CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The $863-billion retirement savings manager has directly backed AI firms like Anthropic, Cohere and OpenAI, and is a limited partner in funds of major AI investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Radical.  

Graham co-hosted the Canada Investment Summit at Carney’s behest last month, and CPP Investments committed $25 billion to a new Maple Fund with Brookfield Asset Management that will invest domestically in strategic industries. 

The new council also includes Canadian business executives and researchers who are based in the U.S., and its domestic members are concentrated in Ontario and Quebec. Of the three national AI institutes, only Montreal-based Mila has a seat on the council, via CEO Valérie Pisano. Thomas Pitfield, Carney’s principal secretary who he recently appointed to the Senate, is another member. Ottawa’s AI strategy outlines “a shared mission,” he said at an event hosted by Canada 2020, a think tank he previously co-founded, this week. “That if we adopt these things together and we trust each other, we’re going to be a powerhouse in this space.”

Ottawa has assembled several other groups of private sector leaders to advise it on AI in recent years, none of which appear to have been formally disbanded. 

In September 2025, AI Minister Evan Solomon named a 28-member task force to provide input on the AI strategy update. Their suggestions included choosing national AI champions and tax changes to encourage new tech firms, as well as speeding up the data-centre buildout and new measures to address risks. Council members who were also on the task force include Pichette as well as Ajay Agrawal, founder of the Creative Destruction Lab accelerator and a partner at Intrepid Growth Partners, which just raised a US$525-million fund.

The Innovation Department also has had an Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence since 2019, set up to help steer Ottawa’s original national AI strategy. In March 2025—days before Carney became prime minister—it refreshed the council with a stronger industry focus, including executives from Cohere, AltaML and Canadian Tire. Department disclosures show the updated group only met once, in June 2025, for an introductory video conference. 

At the same time, the department established a new Safe and Secure AI Advisory Group chaired by Bengio, with researchers whose resumes included University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of Alberta, as well as tech firms like OpenAI, Meta and Google-owned DeepMind. There are no records of that group ever meeting.

The full, 13-person National Council on Artificial Intelligence is as follows:

• Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto professor, founder of the Creative Destructive Lab and a co-founder at Intrepid Growth Partners
• Yoshua Bengio, co-president and scientific director of federally backed LawZero, Université de Montreal professor and chair of the International AI Safety Report
• Sanja Fidler, CEO of Veeda AI, University of Toronto professor and a founding faculty member at the Vector Institute 
• John Graham, CEO of CPP Investments
• Gillian Hadfield, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a faculty member at Vector who was previously the founding director of U of T’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society
• Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner of Radical Ventures, and a Vector co-founder
• Eric Lamarre, a former senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Boston, and a board member at Montreal-headquartered WSP Global 
• Patrick Pichette, who is an ex-officio council member as CEO of Digital Transformation Canada, and was previously a partner at Inovia Capital
• Valérie Pisano, CEO of Mila
• Thomas Pitfield, new Ontario senator and previously Carney’s principal secretary
• Jody Thomas, former national and intelligence security adviser to Carney and former prime minister Justin Trudeau
• Louis Vachon, former CEO at National Bank
• Michelle Zatlyn, Canadian co-founder and president of Cloudflare