Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team!  Missed the last Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. CGI and National Bank of Canada renew partnership for 10 years   CGI and the National Bank of Canada have renewed their partnership for another 10 years, wherein CGI will continue to deliver a wide range of technology services to help the bank enhance its client experience and drive operational excellence. “CGI is a trusted partner in the financial service ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team!  Missed the last Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. FedDev Ontario invests $4.5 million in ventureLAB’s Hardware Catalyst Initiative   The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) has announced an investment of C$4.5 million in Markham-based incubator ventureLAB. The investment is targeted towards Hardware Catalyst Initiative, ventureLAB’s accelerator program tasked with hel ..read more

What are Canadian companies actually doing in terms of projects with cloud and generative AI? How are they navigating the uncertainty of a relatively new technology? Those were the questions that were addressed by a customer panel during a briefing with Canadian media at AWS re:Invent 2023. The panel featured a number of companies from different verticals, ranging from born in the cloud startups to large established enterprises. Here’s some of what they had to say about the use cases they are working on, and the rationale for using generative AI versus more traditional approaches to AI such as ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team! Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. CGI deepens partnership with Google to foster responsible generative AI adoption   CGI and Google have announced that they’re teaming up to help clients accelerate their time-to-value from new generative AI use cases specific to their industries. As part of the agreement, CGI will leverage Google Cloud Platform to enhance the abilities of its CGI PulseAI solu ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team! Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. New app aims to address Canada’s climate crisis Wilder Climate Solutions, Accenture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have released Squiirrel, an app-based digital tree-seed marketplace, in response to this country’s escalating forest crisis.  This app works with Wilder’s other seed-related projects. In fall 2022, the company launched a collaborative project called t ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team! Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. Cybercrime on the rise in Canada, small businesses vulnerable Gearing up for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2023, a new survey by Mastercard has highlighted the surge in cybercrime in the country, particularly affecting small businesses. Since the onset of the pandemic, cyberattacks in Canada have spiked by a staggering 600 per cent. Small businesses, often lacking the ..read more

Canadian regulatory authorities have a habit of taking it slow and easy when it comes to implementing new financial services such as open banking. Although it is currently already available in a host of countries including the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Brazil, it appears that Canadians’ understanding might be quite low, according to results of a study conducted by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) and released in June. The FCAC, which defines open banking as a “framework where consumers and businesses can authorize third party financial service providers to access their financ ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team! Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. Canada continues to falter in internet affordability in new report According to a new report by SurfShark, Canada has the second best internet quality in the world, but ranks 51st in affordability out of the 121 countries examined. Canada was second in internet affordability in 2020, and has since been, alarmingly, tumbling in performance, going to 32nd in 2021 an ..read more

Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada’s editorial team! Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered. Musk aims to get a grip on reality using AI   Co-founder of SpaceX and current chief executive officer of Twitter, Elon Musk, has entered the AI space with the launch of start-up xAI. Musk shared the news of xAI’s formation on Twitter with minimal details about the company’s specific focus, stating only that it aims to “understand reality.”  The start-up’s te ..read more

Maxa, a Montreal-based startup that offers an AI-enabled cloud-based financial analysis application, won the Snowflake Startup Challenge, a competition for startups that create innovative applications and products powered by Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Maxa was the first ever Canadian company to reach the finals of this competition, where it faced Germany’s Semantha.ai and Israel’s Honeydew. In addition to various marketing and mentorship opportunities, the first prize comes with a potential investment of US$500,000. The Snowflake Startup Challenge is organized by Snowflake, a cloud-based data hos ..read more