Within the AI revolution, Canada is quiet but strong

At the Toronto stop on Snowflake's World Tour, the talk was focused on the full integration of services within the tech giant's comprehensive AI-supported offering. It also represented the huge AI presence in Ontario.

Snowflake's Vice-President of Product, Chris Child, made the message clear: Toronto's stop on the tour had the biggest turnout this year, outgrowing every hotel conference space in the city. It was also one of the biggest stops Snowflake made on a global scale.

The quiet revolution

Canada may not always top the global headlines when it comes to AI, but recent data shows that this northern country has a competitive edge. "Canada is actually seeing greater ROI from Gen AI than the global average," Shannon Katschilo, Snowflake's Canada Country Manager, revealed, citing results from Snowflake's latest Radical ROI of Gen AI report.

The findings show that Canadian respondents saw a 43 per cent return on their AI investments, a slight lead above the global average of 41 per cent.

It's a quiet edge with outsized implications. Canada was one of the first countries in the world to appoint a Minister of AI, and cities like Toronto and Montreal are becoming gravitational centres for AI research and development. Snowflake itself chose Toronto as one of its five global engineering hubs back in 2022.

Katschilo says the future of AI innovations will lead to the democratisation of enterprise use. "We've been seeing a lot of adoption with AI specifically in IT organisations, but now we're going to see it in marketing and in finance," she says. "With tools such as Snowflake Intelligence, that's just going to allow people to talk to their data."

Looking back at the report, Canadians tended to use generative AI within more technical teams compared to the rest of the world. This included 74 per cent of Canadian IT teams, compared to 70 per cent globally, and 69 per cent in the Canadian branches of cybersecurity, compared to 65 per cent.

AI-ready data in cyber

At the centre of this AI revolutionising momentum is eSentire, a Canadian cybersecurity firm headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario. Dustin Hillard, Chief Product and Technology Officer at eSentire, pulled back the curtain on how the company is using AI to reinvent cyber threat detection.

For companies like eSentire, the journey into AI began long before ChatGPT became a household name. "We've been in this business for a long time," Hillard explained. "I've been at eSentire around eight years now, and part of when I joined the team, my job was to rearchitect [the data] from the ground up."

This foresight allowed eSentire to normalise incoming data across more than 2,000 clients, regardless of whether it came from Microsoft, Cisco, or other cybersecurity vendors. "All of that data gets normalised and lands in one so we can treat all of our customers as one," Hillard explains. "It's kind of the core design principle that we operate around. Snowflake has been a big part of the way that we've been able to do that, because it makes it easy to land it in one single place across all the different just disparate inputs."

The result was AI-ready data to build the perfect foundation for today's revolutionary stage: agentic AI.

While the autonomous agents are often cast as job eliminators, the reality at eSentire has been more nuanced. The company has enabled AI agents to detect threats faster within the first 10 to 15 minutes, which Hillard says is mission-critical time for a cyber threat.

Instead of replacing people, AI has enabled eSentire's teams to handle more incidents, more thoroughly, and in more regions. In fact, the firm is now leveraging the intelligence of its Canadian Security Operations Centre (SOC) to power services delivered in other countries without requiring staff to be relocated.

"What we've found is that we can actually do so much more. So you can kind of start with a scarcity and efficiency mindset, or you can look for the kind of abundance of hiring and solve new customer problems," says Hillard. "By kind of layering this on top, you know, because we're in security, we only have a few minutes to solve a customer problem before a potential threat unfolds in their environment. So we've been able to deliver hours of expert level work in those first few minutes,"