Turning Quebec’s AI Research Strength Into Economic Power

By Jean-François Harvey
Director of Quebec Affairs

Quebec has built one of the world's most respected artificial intelligence research ecosystems in the world. We’ve done it through good timing and, more importantly, a series of strategic choices: sustained public investment in Montreal’s innovation cluster over two decades, anchor institutions, and a deep bench of research talent that global labs now recruit from directly.

As the province heads into a fall general election, that legacy risks being treated as a settled achievement rather than an open question of what’s next. Quebec’s next government should see its opportunity to meet the moment and enact policies that translate our world-class research ecosystem translate into global companies.

Our Quebec election primer What Quebec Innovators Need to Scale lays out the broader case for why scaling homegrown firms is the province's central economic challenge this decade. AI adoption is where that challenge is most visible, and most misdiagnosed.

The wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong prescription. The default policy instinct (not unique to Quebec) has been to treat slow AI adoption as a trust problem: businesses are hesitant, wary, and undereducated on the technology, so government should fund literacy campaigns and digital-skills programs to build confidence. While this is an intuitive theory, the evidence does not support it well.

The barriers holding back AI adoption among Quebec's small and medium-sized enterprises are the same barriers that have always slowed technology diffusion: limited capital, organizational complexity, and thin internal technical capacity. Businesses do not adopt AI cautiously because they distrust it. Business do not adopt it because they lack the balance sheet, the data infrastructure, and the specialized talent to make it pay off. CCI has made this same argument in response to Ottawa's AI for All strategy, and the underwhelming results of past federal upskilling programs bear it out. Free-floating literacy initiatives, however well-intentioned, do not build the organizational capacity that adoption actually requires.

The implication for Quebec's next government is straightforward: the fastest way to drive AI diffusion across the economy is to grow more scaled, capitalized companies with the internal capability to deploy AI and pull their suppliers and clients along with them.

It should be made clear: adoption without ownership is a rental agreement. Where adoption does happen, it matters enormously what gets adopted. If Quebec's path to AI diffusion runs through off-the-shelf platforms built and owned by foreign multinationals, the province captures the productivity bump but not the IP, high-value jobs, or export potential that come with owning the technology itself. Sovereign digital infrastructure should be understood as economic infrastructure, no different from a port or a power grid, and treating it as optional is how a province, or country for that matter, ends up a tenant in an economy it should own.

Procurement is the lever already in the government's hands. Quebec has an underused tool to solve both problems at once: its own purchasing power. The province's Stratégie d'intégration de l'intelligence artificielle dans l'administration publique 2021-2026 commits the public sector to AI adoption. This strategy's success should be measured by whether government becomes the anchor customer that lets homegrown firms scale. A public sector reference client can be the difference between a Quebec AI company staying small and going global. Aligning procurement with Quebec-based scale-ups builds exportable IP, skilled jobs, and a domestic supply chain all in one move.

Whoever forms government this fall inherits a genuine strength in Quebec's AI research base, and converting that into economic power requires helping Quebec scale-ups adopt. The evidence points to capacity, capital, and ownership, rather than trust, as the real constraints, and to procurement as one of the more immediately actionable levers available to the province. A platform built on scaling firms, retaining IP, and buying homegrown will do more for AI adoption than any awareness campaign can.
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About the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI)

The Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) is Canada’s business council for the 21st century economy. We are a collective of over 175 of Canada’s fastest-growing and most ambitious companies, and the founders, CEOs, and executives behind them, working together to improve the business conditions that help more homegrown companies scale, compete globally, and drive long-term prosperity.