ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Intern demand stuns firm
When machine learning and artificial intelligence company Altaml announced the creation of its new data science internship program earlier this year, it didn't know exactly what to expect.
The company — which was founded in Edmonton and expanded to Calgary in 2019 — had been awarded a $3.25 million grant from the city's Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund for its idea for an Applied AI Lab based in Calgary. The goal was to offer paid internships to approximately 240 individuals over a three-year period, giving them hands-on experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the ability to work on real-world industry problems.
Four major Alberta companies — Suncor, Transalta Corp., ATB Financial and Spartan Controls — had signed on as partners for the project and had expressed enthusiasm about the AI Lab's ability to support and enhance their own corporate digital transformation programs. But while Altaml knew there was demand on the industry side, they still weren't sure how many individuals would want to apply for the program.
“That was one thing I flagged as potentially a concern,” said Danielle Gifford, program manager for the Applied AI Lab. “If we were going to be running this over a three-year period, would we have the supply? Are there enough people out there who are looking for this kind of experience? And then we got 550 applicants ... and we were like, `OK, people are definitely looking for this kind of experience.'”
Altaml ultimately selected eight of those applicants to make up its first cohort of interns, who started working earlier this month. And while the company will continue taking in interns every three months for the three-year term of the project, the overwhelming response to Altaml's first call for applicants illustrates that artificial intelligence and machine learning have officially gone mainstream in Alberta.
“We knew there was a demand for a program like this for people coming out of school,” said Altaml managing director Lucas Scheer. “I think we underestimated the demand.”
Scheer said just a couple of years ago, he spent much of his time just trying to educate individuals and companies about what artificial intelligence actually is. Now, he said most large companies with a presence in downtown Calgary have their own on-staff data science teams and most are deploying some kind of machine learning technology, at least on an experimental level.
“The shift has been really quite rapid,” Scheer said. “There's actually a lot going on in Calgary in this space.”
The companies partnering with Altaml on the internship program are among those trying to be on the forefront of what advocates believe will be an increasingly data-driven economy in years to come. Suncor's “4.0” program, for example, is meant to herald a new digital age for the oilsands giant — harnessing the power of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The company was the first Canadian energy company to announce a move toward fully autonomous trucks at its oilsands mines and last year announced a major deal with Microsoft to help speed its transition into the technological age.
ATB Financial has an entire AI and machine learning strategy aimed at bringing the crown corporation into the future through the exploration of cutting-edge financial technologies and services.
Scheer said Alberta companies are actually ahead of the North American curve when it comes to embracing artificial intelligence in their business models. He said
this may be because the University of Alberta has long been a globally recognized leader in pure AI research. The University of Calgary now also offers its own program in data science and analytics, and both post-secondaries are helping to raise awareness about the field and graduate trained talent.
Still, companies looking to hire in the data science and machine learning space are running into the same problem plaguing Calgary's tech sector as a whole — there simply are not enough skilled workers to meet the demand.
“A lot of these folks have historically left Alberta to go to Silicon Valley, to go to larger centres in Canada,” Scheer said.
“This talent is in high demand, like a lot of other tech talent in this city. And that supply is currently
just not meeting demand.”
Scheer said he hopes Altaml's internship program will serve as a “talent pipeline,” keeping skilled graduates in the province and helping companies leverage the power of AI to improve Alberta's competitiveness.
“There's definitely a sentiment out there that AI will come in and replace people, that machine learning will eliminate the need for people to work at these companies. And that's not what we're seeing practically,” Scheer said.
“What we're seeing is when people make decisions with the support of artificial intelligence, it's easier to make better decisions. AI empowers organizations to make better decisions, faster.”
We knew there was a demand for a program like this for people coming out of school. We underestimated the demand.