EY answers demand for agentic AI with Canadian-built platform
Canada's artificial intelligence scene has an outstanding balance of offensive innovation and defensive, responsible security.
That's what EY Canada's Chief Technology Officer, Biren Agnihotri, says makes this country a vital developer in the current stream of agentic AI platforms.
This month, EY Canada released FlexiGenAI, a new platform built to help organisations move from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment without requiring software development skills. The product is now generally available following internal development through the firm's Canadian innovation centre.
The Innovation Centre is a global initiative among the consulting firm, although Agnihotri is happy to report that Canadians led the charge behind EY's plug-and-play agent marketplace. According to the CTO, starting from the ground up in Canada makes the product specifically tailored to help a Canadian audience.
"[Global projects] have to start thinking of very big architecture, very big data residency, data privacy, and all the regulatory aspects," he says. "So from day one, there are certain blockers which come in front of you. Whereas when we start things in Canada, it's pretty nimble. We start from the minimum sellable product."
The platform's introduction follows a period in which Canadian organisations have increased investment in AI infrastructure, with specific interest in tools that can scale safely inside complex operating environments. Emerging Canadian tech giants like Cohere are securing millions from government and private investment to develop their enterprise-scale models. Legacy tech infrastructure players like Bell and Telus have also announced investments in autonomous AI. The latter announced a sovereign AI factory in Quebec in September.
At the agentic marketplace level, global tech players Snowflake and Oracle have launched platforms developed in the U.S. market with availability in Canada.
A recent KPMG in Canada survey found that 88 per cent of Canadian business owners believe adopting agentic AI would help their organisation become more competitive. KPMG in Canada launched their Agentic AI engine in May.
EY's client-oriented platform offers a drag-and-drop canvas for agent design, along with a plug-and-play architecture that connects AI tools and workflows inside a single managed environment. According to EY, FlexiGenAI includes telemetry, observability, auditability, citations, privacy filtering and expansion hooks to meet enterprise governance and scalability expectations. The firm positions these controls as central to responsible deployment in regulated environments and cross-functional settings.
"You can publish [agents], and then other people, if they like it, they need not to rebuild. They can just import that agent and they can use it," says Agnihotri. "We are doing it internally within the departments. Our eventual goal is that clients can even share between each other, and we will put a kind of commercial model around it, that whosoever is building that agent gets some commercial benefit of investing on that agent."
FlexiGenAI is already in use with early clients across sectors, including financial services, manufacturing and healthcare. EY reports that participating organisations have recorded improvements in productivity, risk management and customer experience by automating structured work, augmenting decision support and increasing cross-functional collaboration.
Image courtesy of EY Canada.
