Ottawa — October 1
The future of money
A September 27 Financial Post article detailed on how Sarah Friar, CFO of Square, thinks about the digital payment development. She thinks focusing on cash is a cost to merchants. “Instead of focusing on your business, you’re focused on this thing called cash, and that has real economic cost to you,” she said. Cash is free of attachments, which is useful in some situations, but it doesn’t generate data, and data is the new oil, said the article.
Scaling up the Canadian digital economy
According to a report wrote by The Digital Industries Economic Strategy Table, Canada ICT sector needs to double the number of businesses earning $1 billion or more in annual revenue by 2025 in order to keep our digital advantage globally. The recommendations included in the report laid out a few steps to achieve the goal:
- Scaling up Canadian businesses.
- Attract and retain skilled talent.
- Transform Canada into a digital society.
- Leverage IP and promote the value of data.
Canada is behind on AI adoption success rate
The study “AI Momentum, Maturity and Models for Success” in which put Canada last place out of 10 countries sampled. Globally, 51 per cent of AI adopters reported success but that number is only 31 per cent in Canada. However, AI ethics seem to be the focus for us, with 73 per cent of adopters have an ethics committee to review the use of AIs, comparing to 65 per cent of the U.S or 36 per cent of Germany firms.
“Organizations have begun addressing concerns and aberrations that AI has been known to cause, such as biased and unfair treatment of people,” said Rumman Chowdhury, Responsible AI Lead at Accenture Applied Intelligence. Read the report here.
MaRS report on diversity and inclusion of Toronto tech sector
For this report, MaRS surveyed a total of 456 members of Toronto’s tech community. There were focus groups with 110 Toronto tech sector employers and 28 tech sector employees, as well as interviews with 16 DIBs experts. Some key findings are:
- Persons with disabilities are 2.4 times more likely to disagree that their organization promotes belonging.
- 66 percent of black employees reported that they had been subject to bias on one or more aspects of their identity, compared to 47 percent of white employees.
- Women were twice as likely to disagree that their organization is diverse or fosters belonging.
- Indigenous people felt significant racism exists in the workplace and contributes negatively towards feelings of inclusion and belonging.
