Amii was asked to expand its health-care research to be eligible for funding, so the organization added health and biosystems to its portfolio, giving it another five-year window of financial support, Goebel said.





Other organizations have stepped up to this new challenge from the government. Reg Joseph, CEO of Health City in Edmonton, is using his nonprofit as a connector between tech companies and multinationals to address local health problems. As the home of 50 percent of the province’s life sciences companies, with 4.3 million people all under one health authority, and an open data portal, Edmonton is a strong test bed for new technologies.





But connecting the tech industry with clinicians who work with valuable data is a unique challenge. Health City was the driver of connecting AltaML and Boehringer Ingelheim Canada to develop a tool that predicts how aging affects health.





“We’ve brought industry in to help the clinicians,” said Joseph.



Local tech companies have also created jobs for grads who would have otherwise pursued opportunities outside the province. In 2017, Google’s DeepMind opened its first international office in Edmonton. Sutton, who has been an advisor to DeepMind since 2010, wanted to stay in the city, and convinced the giant to tap into the talent that already existed.





Alongside Toronto’s Vector Institute and Montreal’s MILA, Amii also became an official part of the federal government’s $125-million Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. Deepmind choosing Edmonton was a major proof point for the city, according to CIFAR chair Elissa Strome, who leads funding for the Pan-Canadian AI strategy.





“We were looking for places where there was already a deep ecosystem that was under development and being built, and a real strength we wanted to capitalize on and expand on,” said Strome, noting Edmonton’s strength in reinforcement learning. “Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton were the natural places to identify not-for-profit research institutes.”





The Royal Bank of Canada also chose to make Edmonton its first Canadian base for RBC Research (today’s Borealis AI) outside of its Toronto headquarters in 2017. For researchers who want to stay in the province, it’s a valuable source of work.





“It’s my hypothesis that U of A was able to push the boundaries of reinforcement learning because the research groups there were so tight with each other and collaborated so well that they didn’t get distracted by the rest of the deep learning woes in the rest of the country,” said Foteini Agrafioti, RBC’s chief science officer and the head of Borealis AI, who added that RBC chose to set up in Edmonton within a month of first visiting.





Of course, it’s nearly impossible for Alberta to abandon oil and gas completely. But with AI’s capacity to produce predictive insights from large volumes of data, the energy sector is set to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI. The World Economic Forum estimates the digitization of the industry could unlock $1.6 trillion USD in value globally.