At AI conference, old-school telcos pitch cutting-edge digital ‘sovereignty’

President and CEO of BCE Inc. Mirko Bibic takes part in an interview at the All In AI conference in Montreal on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

MONTREAL — Canada’s traditional telecom companies are jockeying for a piece of the federal government’s push for “digital sovereignty” in AI.

Among the thousands of business executives and tech specialists attending the All In Conference in Montreal on Wednesday was Mirko Bibic, CEO of Bell Canada.

Seated behind a Bell desk bracketed by booths representing tech firms, governments and research institutions, Bibic told The Canadian Press he was in Montreal to spread the word that his company is fully in the AI space.

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With a shifting “geopolitical environment,” sovereignty is becoming “super critical,” Bibic said.

That includes digital sovereignty -- a principle Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon defined in his opening keynote at the conference as a digital economy “that someone else can’t decide to turn off.”

Digital sovereignty doesn’t have an official definition but it often incorporates the idea of building digital infrastructure and storing data within a country.

Bibic said he sees multiple components to digital sovereignty, including AI “compute” -- the technology that enables artificial intelligence systems to perform tasks -- along with data storage, networking, trust and safety.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the new Major Projects Office to oversee the fast-tracking of nation-building projects, he included building a “sovereign cloud” on its to-do list.

A sovereign cloud is a computing environment companies use to run services which can be set up to comply with a specific country’s laws or core values.

The “Canadian tech ecosystem” needs to be at the centre of Ottawa’s digital sovereignty strategy, Bibic said.

That includes all elements of that ecosystem, he said, including “large companies like Bell that are sovereign by definition, sovereign in history and have always been kind of part of Canada’s economic fabric.”

Bell announced in May its AI Fabric project, which will see the company open six artificial intelligence data centres in B.C. as part of a plan to create the largest AI compute project in Canada.

In July, Bell announced a partnership with artificial intelligence company Cohere to provide end-to-end sovereign AI solutions for government and enterprise customers across Canada. Cohere is making its AI services available through Bell AI Fabric, while Bell is incorporating North, Cohere’s agentic AI platform (an autonomous AI system that makes proactive decisions) into AI Fabric.

Bibic said that when Bell first announced the AI Fabric project, Solomon encouraged the company to get involved with the Canadian tech ecosystem and put him and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in touch.

“And that sparked a dialogue between the two of us and our executive teams, which ultimately led pretty quickly” to the partnership, Bibic said.

Bell wasn’t the only telco -- a telecom company that got its start in traditional wired telephone infrastructure -- with a booth at the AI conference.

On the first day of the conference, Telus announced what it called in a press release Canada’s first fully sovereign AI Factory.

It’s a facility that offers AI compute to others who want to use it, said Jaime Tatis, senior vice-president and chief AI officer at TELUS. He said it’s an extension of what his company has been doing for decades.

“When you think about wireless networks, it was cable before, fibre now ... it’s the continuation of how we build technical infrastructure for the country,” he said.

Tatis said sovereignty was always going to be a “critical ingredient” of his company’s work in AI. but the changing geopolitical environment put it on “the radar much quicker than anticipated.”

Bibic said he’s been “pretty encouraged” by Carney’s approach to telecom, broadcasting and digital policy, including artificial intelligence.

“I see a government that wants to seize the moment, which means ... having the right vision and moving fast,” he said. “And so far, so good.”

The AI conference closed with a speech by the minister traditionally responsible for the telecom file.

“We know that old alliances that we used to take for granted don’t necessarily work anymore,” Industry Minister Melanie Joly told the audience.

“Now, new alliances are being formed and we need to make sure that national economic strength becomes once more a priority.

“That’s where you come in, because we need economic growth. And AI is all about economic growth. We need to make sure that while there’s still a lot of unpredictability and that will be our reality, we can continue to work together on what we can control.”

Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press

With files from Sammy Hudes

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2025.

CTV News and BNN Bloomberg are owned by Bell Media, which is a division of BCE.