Reflections on the Canada trip.

Alex Ryan is a dear friend, one of the deepest thinkers I know around systems challenges and how to work thorough them and someone who is a collaborator and partner for Helix Lab. Alex set up a lot of the meetings and connections that enabled me to have such rich and fulfilling week.

A second collaborator was Balaji Pulivarthi who has spent more than 15 yrs in Toronto like Alex and we are exploring some really practical AI solutions to key challenges in the health industry.

For Canada the goal was to understand and explore what is happening (sensemaking), where are they at say compared to Australia, US, Europe etc and whats the opportunity.

Five things that stood out to me.

1. The Canadian structure is the same as Australia. Three levels of government and multiple overlapping issues and scale can be an issue. 440 councils in Ontario if my recollection is right.

What we are doing here with Councils is super valuable and Canada will have the same opportunities from how do we use AI for community benefits, save costs, improve services and become more AI Native

2. The SMEs in Canada and I had the chance to talk to and understand issues from $1M to $150M due to connects from Balaji and the Toronto Region Board of Trade where I presented to 10+ companies at the end of their six month AI Adoption Journey.

Everyone gets AI, they are super keen and they want to move. Some are deep into using Claude Code to optimise their e-commerce platforms, others are still thinking how to move beyond the chat window.

What I saw though was clear articulation of challenges that are manual, drudgery in my language, and things that AI can automate. We are going to start working on that in the health services space soon.

For larger SMEs, my reflection is that strategy is still key. No amount of AI-pilling is enough if you do not have a strategy.

3. An amazing deep dive into what it means for AI in the health ecosystem and the public sector space was a dinner hosted by Sophia Ikura ED at the Health Commons Solutions Lab who opened her house, lovely food and amazing bunch of people. Chatham house rules, so cant say much more but the deep conversations left with a sense of what possible, whats needed and how we all need to work together to create value.

4. At the enterprise scale -- some of the largest companies are obviously moving forward with chatgpt, claude, copilot but still not enabling new capability building in employees fully. How do we move from individual productivity to team productivity is still a challenge.

At the same time some are at the cutting edge, understand this deeply like @joe greenwood at Master Card and the amazing work they are doing. We really hit it off with deep conversations on tokenomics, the 9Q grid that I designed and how to think about agentic implementations.

5. What does all mean for Education? I think there is a serious opportunity here but universities need to move fast and rethink the education opportunities.

We are on the cusp of designing a small start to this for business designers and how they can become AI Native. Stay tuned.