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As it stands, she said, Canada is not doing enough to keep its AI expertise “serving us, rather than letting our supply trickle elsewhere.”

Wallis directly asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the adoption of artificial intelligence for an episode of Accenture’s The AI Effect podcast this fall.

Photo by Peter J. Thopmson/National Post

“We know there are a lot of people working hard on this all around the world, and Canada has advantages that we need to build on,” Trudeau said. “And that means getting our businesspeople to really realize that this transformative technology is not just closer than it may seem, but more accessible because we’re surrounded by so many strong AI ecosystems in Canada.”

What exactly those ecosystems are is as murky as the definition of artificial intelligence itself. Trudeau offered one definition of it in the interview, Accenture’s is a little bit different, but the label is also getting slapped on all sorts of technologies as a marketing tool.

In short, AI is not one thing, but a whole range of technologies where computers mimic human intelligence.

One subset is machine learning, where a computer system has an automatic feedback function so it can learn from experience and change its behaviour over time to get smarter.

But even machine learning has subsets, including deep learning, which uses computer algorithms called neural networks that are structured to mimic the way the human brain works.

Deep learning is where a lot of the industry excitement is, because neural networks are particularly good at chewing through large amounts of data — especially unstructured data such as photos, video and text — and identifying patterns.