Report from Edmonton City, Canada(2/2)Promotion of AI businessSupport to local companies by regional administration and community

This article is written by Mr. Kenji Kobayashi, Senior Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies（NEC Group）

Ecosystem
Following the national AI strategy of Canada Edmonton City is striving to establish Ecosystem to create AI industry. “Warm and generous measures for industry promotion by regional administration” and “Community led by region” are driving forces there to realize planned ecosystem.

Among many measures to promote industry one notable example is that Edmonton City and the province of Alberta are both funding the establishment of business accelerators and incubators to support the activities of local business. In the year 2018 the city funded about 100 million yen to establish business accelerator “Health City” for health care services with AI technology further to promote partnership with domestic and foreign large private enterprises.

The incubator owned by the city is fostering many start-up companies in the AI domain. This supporting system and structure is highly appreciated by many start-ups.

“Community led by region” is very unique. In 2017 three local businessmen started new community group for AI industry “Edmonton AI” and have been expanding their activities beyond their own interests.

In July, 2018 they drafted up “Alberta AI Business Plan” as a guideline for regional activities in cooperation with other 70 local representatives of industry, government and academia. These activities were all on the volunteer basis.

Bruce Alton, a leading player for these activities, commented “Edmonton is the area where people are closely and strongly tied and connected. This is our biggest advantage.”

100 billion yen by 2025
In “Alberta AI Business Plan” the high target was agreed that regional AI related business and industries should be established and uplifted to the scale of 100 billion yen by the year 2025.

Implementation strategy to achieve the goal is rather simple by combining and incorporating the biggest advantage and asset of Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) and other 8 advantages and assets available in the province of Alberta, and they selected the fields of their utmost advantage and the regional administration makes focused and prioritized investment there.

The Province will be for the time being focusing and limiting to the theme of “AI x Health care industry”. They believe they can win the game even in severe competition with other big cities.

The reason for their confidence is explained by Mr. Reg Joseph, Chief Executive Officer of Health City that there are a number of internationally acknowledged experts of AI and health care, and, there are very advanced and ideal environment of date usage.

A large volume of EHR (Electronic Health Record; individual life-time electronic health record) for about 4 million people are administered and managed by one single organization and in next autumn 38 billion yen will be invested to combine different clinical information systems into one consolidated system.

Health City believes that consolidating a variety of health care data creates new value as a result. They are also planning to establish new health care service in the predicting style with AI technology by combining not only health care data but open public and social data of the city.

Good Partnership
Edmonton City is organizing ecosystem in well competition with those of other domestic two cities. What impressed the most is that they do not have any idea to create new strength for AI industry (No investment for the purpose).

The environment of health care data usage as counted as their strength and advantage has been improved and enhanced spontaneously in the efforts of solving social issues of reduction of health care spending. It is not because AI has been there to improve from the start.

In Edmonton there are redundant number of excellent human resources with relatively inexpensive renumeration level. Edmonton is located in “Canada, hidden AI power” and can be regarded as “hidden good partner” for Japan suffering from the shortage of AI human resources.