Canada's telco and banking incumbents form AI consortium. Scotiabank, Sun Life, Telus, and Lightworks team up to build AI infrastructure at the enterprise level. Companies at the top of Canada's banking, financial services, and telecommunications industries have teamed up with a startup consultancy to take on their AI infrastructure problems together. The news: Scotiabank, Sun Life, Telus, and Lightworks announced a new industry group with a straightforward name, The AI Consortium, on Tuesday morning. The group says its members will work together to create solutions for the shared challenges that large, regulated institutions face when implementing AI. The Consortium's members will combine their engineering and research efforts to collaborate on building and governing the AI infrastructure and intellectual property they would need to develop on their own anyway. When The Consortium develops IP, all of its members can use and benefit from it. From the source: Speaking to the Financial Post, Sun Life's Laura Money compared The AI Consortium to Symcor, which was launched by Canadian banks TD, RBC, and BMO in the 1990s to avoid redundancies in their work to process cheques. "That consortium was an interesting precedent in Canada since competitors came together to solve a common problem," she told the Financial Post. "It was the strength of cooperating that really strengthened the industry as a whole." Following the thread: Founded last year by CEO John Painter, Toronto-based consultancy Lightworks is the managing founding member of The Consortium. The company secured financing from venture firm Round13 this past February to unite "some of the world's largest regulated entities" to build standards behind enterprise AI deployment. The Consortium has been built over the last 18 months, according to Painter, and other firms are invited to join. Final thought: As more and more companies develop enterprise AI agents, the AI Consortium's first project is an effort to keep tabs on them. The Agentic Control Plane is supposed to help members see and manage how agentic AI is being deployed in their organization. Future Consortium projects include the AI Operations Center, which it said will improve AI performance and cost management, and the AI Token Exchange, which will simplify and expand access to "sovereign AI factories." Feature image courtesy Lightworks. Roborock Discover the next generation of cleaning innovation. Roborock redefines home robotics with AI-powered systems that sense, adapt, and operate seamlessly in real homes.

Lightworks expands into Singapore to accelerate AI and control-plane engineering across Asia Pacific. TORONTO and SINGAPORE, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Lightworks, a global AI and enterprise technology firm, today announced the launch of its Singapore entity, marking a major expansion across Asia Pacific. The move advances Lightworks' global strategy to support the world's largest and most highly regulated enterprises with large scale AI adoption and Control Planes, mission critical program support, and AI builder experiences. As part of this expansion, Lightworks has appointed Singapore-based Ian Donaldson as its initial Principal Consultant. Donaldson brings more than a decade of experience delivering cloud, data, and AI initiatives for regulated enterprises across Southeast Asia. Most recently, he served as Principal Engineer at Oliver Wyman, and previously built and led the ASEAN consulting practice at Sourced Group, specializing in large-scale cloud transformations for highly regulated and security-conscious organizations. Deep Regional Experience in Regulated Enterprise The Lightworks team brings significant on-the-ground experience across Singapore and the broader APAC region, having previously built and scaled regional consulting teams supporting organizations across financial services, aviation, and security. That experience matters as enterprises enter the next phase of transformation. Many of the organizations that underwent large-scale cloud adoption over the past decade are now facing a new wave of operational and technological complexity driven by AI. The Lightworks team has been managing the introduction of net-new and highly iterative technology into regulated environments for over a decade, combining deep technical expertise with firsthand knowledge of how these institutions operate, the environments they manage, and the obligations they are required to meet. "Singapore has always been a progressive adopter of new technology cycles, and for our team this is a return to familiar ground," said John Painter, founder and CEO of Lightworks. "We've spent over a decade helping regulated Singapore enterprises absorb new technology without breaking what already works. AI and the control systems around it are the next chapter of that work, and we have a fond relationship with Singapore, where institutions move deliberately, and when they move, they move at scale." Building Locally, Delivering Globally The announcement follows a period of significant momentum for Lightworks, which earlier this year secured up to $12 million in financing led by Round13 Capital to accelerate the deployment of AI agents at scale for the world's largest regulated enterprises, with active engagements spanning North America, Australia, and Asia Pacific. "The world's most complex technology challenges require people who have operated inside the institutions facing them," Painter added. "Southeast Asia is home to some of the most sophisticated regulated enterprises in the world, including banks, carriers, and government institutions managing technology at enormous scale. That requires exceptional practitioners - which is the standard our team set in the region years ago, and the standard we're returning to uphold." About Lightworks Lightworks is a specialist technology firm enabling the world's largest, most highly regulated, and security-conscious enterprises to execute mission-critical AI deployments, accelerate modernization initiatives, and deliver complex cloud transformation programs at scale. The firm operates across North America, Singapore, and Australia, serving clients in financial services, telecommunications, insurance, and government.