Hi {{first_name}},

Last week I spoke with two of the country's best CISOs, both up for CISO of the Year at the CIO Association of Canada’s CanadianCIO Awards, and a Stanford PhD whose dissertation focused on the ROI of cybersecurity. 

As you can imagine, I asked questions and tried to stay out of the way.

Biying He runs cybersecurity at TransLink. Rob Antonishen does the same at B.C. Hydro. 

If either of them gets something wrong, it doesn't show up as a bad quarter. It means people are stuck at a fare gate or a province is in the dark. AI agents, patching, and keeping their teams from burning out are things they take seriously. 

"We don't need to govern AI because we don't trust the technology," says Antonishen. "We have to govern AI because we're accountable for what the AI actually does."

→ Read: How to show a board that security is working, on He's rebuild at TransLink and what she puts in front of the board

→ Read: What comes first when cybersecurity never ends?, on how Antonishen decides which 30-year-old system gets protected first

Watch our full conversation: 

Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne says the people in the room at this week's Canada Investment Summit control more than $120 trillion in global capital. Bank of America and Berkshire Hathaway sent representatives despite the trade war.

Carney opened this morning's session the same morning a new round of U.S. tariffs took effect, asking for more than $1 trillion over five years on critical minerals, energy, and a new pipeline carrying at least a million barrels of Alberta oil a day to Asian markets.

Canadian technology companies are looking to capture some of that investment. The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association ran its own forum on Monday, and CEO Benjamin Bergen told Jennifer Kervin he wants venture, growth-stage and mid-market companies in the conversation, particularly the ones that would supply the technology the projects on Carney's list will need.

"If we're looking for speed and we're looking for opportunity to grow our GDP," he says. "It really is in the venture and mid-market firms that will be able to move quickly to create that opportunity."

Of the eight developed markets the CPP Investments Insights Institute studied, Canada came out on top, with 94% of investors expecting to maintain or increase their Canadian exposure over the next three years, ahead of Japan at 82% and the United States at 77%.

→ Read: Can Canada turn trust into global investment?

If you’re like me, most of your experience with AI happens through a screen. Vention is working on how that changes when it moves into the physical world. 

The company opened a physical AI lab in Montreal last week built around robotic manipulation. A robot arm that runs the same weld a few thousand times a day isn’t new. Getting one to find a part that never sits in quite the same place, pick it up without crushing it, and fit it into a housing that varies by a millimetre is still a work in progress. 

PwC Canada launched a consulting practice for the same thing six days earlier, moving robots and autonomous systems into mines, plants and logistics floors.

"The challenge is no longer simply proving that a robot can perform a task in a lab," says Etienne Lacroix, Vention's founder and CEO.

Jennifer Friesen reports on what it takes to get past that, including what a plant needs in place before a robot earns its keep, and why the people who'd run one are already hard to find.

→ Read: What a smarter factory robot still can't fix

Some light reading for when the prep-meeting for the meeting runs long

Why organizations are moving past full digital sovereignty 59% of executives told Capgemini that full digital sovereignty isn't achievable, which is an unusually frank answer for a board-level topic. More than a third would need over a year to leave a critical technology provider, and 10% have no viable alternative. Among organizations that had recently been through an operational disruption, only 42% had a contingency plan.

Ottawa puts $13 million into AI literacy Free training delivered through Amii is meant to reach up to one million post-secondary students and more than 50,000 K-12 educators, covering how to assess AI output and spot bias, misinformation and privacy risk. Schools can sign on starting Sept. 21. The student course runs three hours, and Ottawa has published reach targets but isn’t saying how it will measure what anyone learned.

Anthropic boss calls for slowing pace of AI development Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities, writing that he's become convinced addressing the risks takes more prudence than the industry is showing. The call came days after a researcher who'd worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic quit the industry saying neither company is acting responsibly. Sam Altman said something similar in late July. Maybe after the IPOs?

CIOs get the blame when AI agents get it wrong 52% of CIOs and CTOs say the CIO is accountable when an AI agent makes an error, in a survey of 2,501 technology leaders that 8x8 commissioned from Censuswide in July. Customer service leadership came second at 16%, and 6% put it on legal or compliance. "The CIO is now the last line of defence for AI," said Samuel Wilson, CEO at 8x8, which is a polite way of saying the person who didn't pick the vendor signs the incident report.

Cybersecurity is one of the few jobs where doing it well looks like nothing happening. No outage, no breach, no headline.

Both of the CISOs I spoke with have a way to show a board what that's worth. At TransLink, He tracks how long a system takes to come back and whether anyone has tested it lately. At B.C. Hydro, Antonishen tells directors a phishing takedown protects customer trust, because that's something a director can act on.

The winner will be announced Oct. 1 in Toronto. Follow along for more coverage from other categories and find out who takes home the award.

— David

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