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If the fun Canadian business story of the moment is cannabis, the serious one is artificial intelligence (AI). When Stephen Poloz, the Bank of Canada governor, devoted a speech to creative destruction last month, he wasn’t thinking about pot. AI will reshape entire industries; tens of thousands of jobs will be taken over by computers, (hopefully) at least as many will be created in the process.

“In the future, AI is going to be as normal and as natural as the electricity in this room right now,” Carolina Bessega, chief scientific officer at Stradigi AI, told me in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Montreal earlier this month. “Nobody is going to talk about it because everyone is going to use it and have it.”

Bessega’s future is coming at us quickly.

Less than five years ago, Stradigi was just another developer of custom software. Then a retail chain asked the company to clean up a very messy inventory system. The job required sorting tens of thousands of items into a single database. It would have taken a human months to do it. So Bessega went to her boss, Basil Bouraropoulos, the chief executive, and said that she might be able to build an AI system that could do the work in a couple of hours. She was right; the gamble worked and the client was happy.

Bouraropoulos, an entrepreneur with a background in coding, refocused his company immediately. “We didn’t go into AI because it was a bubble, because in 2014 the bubble wasn’t there,” he said. “The bubble really started in 2016.”