Lightworks, Scotiabank, Sun Life and TELUS launch AI Consortium

Scotiabank, Sun Life, and TELUS have joined technology firm Lightworks to pool engineering and research, jointly building shared AI control systems.

On July 7, the group launched the AI Consortium, a shared structure for building and governing the control systems regulated enterprises need to run AI safely at scale. Lightworks, a firm specializing in AI deployments for regulated enterprises, is the consortium’s Managing Founding Member and lead builder. The idea is that the hardest parts of enterprise AI, keeping oversight and operational control as usage grows, are the same at every large institution, so the members build jointly and each deploy the result.

The Consortium‘s flagship program, the Agentic Control Plane (ACP) is already in production across the members. It gives an enterprise visibility and control across the models, agents, users and inference pipelines running underneath, and currently moves more than two trillion tokens a month across the member organizations.

The members jointly develop IP each would otherwise have to build alone, then deploy it inside their own organizations with perpetual-use and ownership rights. This “build together, own separately” approach works because no single institution ends up renting its AI controls from a vendor.

Ownership is where sovereignty shows up.

“Canada’s regulated institutions have been solving the same AI challenges independently for too long – duplicating effort and cost,” says Hesham Fahmy, EVP, COO and CIO at TELUS. “Through the AI Consortium, we are coming together to develop Canadian-owned AI intellectual property that gives our organizations greater control over our data, operations, and AI capabilities.”

Two more projects are on the roadmap, optional to each member. First is an AI Operations Center for shared performance and cost monitoring. Second is an AI Token Exchange meant to expand access to sovereign AI factories, meaning AI compute kept under Canadian control rather than routed through US hyperscalers.

For now the consortium has four members across sectors (banking, telecom, and insurance), with the door open to institutions at comparable scale and complexity. The common thread isn’t sector. All three run different businesses and hit the same governance problem.

“By combining execution across organizations facing the same requirements, we achieve a scale and capabilities beyond what could be done alone,” says John Painter, founder and CEO of Lightworks. “This is the first step of many, and we invite others who share this ambition to help build what comes next, together.”

Final Shots

• Scotiabank, Sun Life, and TELUS are building shared AI controls with Lightworks rather than each building their own.
• The flagship system, the Agentic Control Plane, is already in production and handles more than two trillion tokens a month.
• Members build the technology together but keep ownership rights to deploy it on their own.