Showcasing AI application in ‘legacy industry’

OAK BLUFF — A non-profit dedicated to helping Canadian businesses adopt artificial intelligence tools to increase productivity is giving a Manitoba agritech company a funding boost.

Scale AI — a consortium of private entities, research centres, academia and high-potential startups that is backed by the federal government — is supporting Agi3 with $4.7 million.

The funding was announced Wednesday at the Enns Brothers Ltd. office in Oak Bluff. It followed Scale AI’s announcement in Toronto on Tuesday it is investing $128.5 million to support 44 new AI projects across Canada.

Agi3 is the only Manitoba company to receive an investment from Scale AI during this round of funding.

Agi3 has developed sensors and AI analytics that provide 24-7 monitoring of crop performance and it has developed insurance products around the technology.

“This is a project that’s funded federally by Scale AI that is really being driven by Manitoba companies with a solution for growers in the ag industry right across Canada,” said Ray Bouchard, co-founder of Agi3, and president and CEO of Enns Brothers. “It really showcases the application of AI in a legacy industry and a legacy business.”

Agi3 enables agriculture insurance carriers and brokers to build complete digital profiles of farms, said Kyle Gibson, the company’s managing director of operations.

These profiles deliver quicker risk-aligned quotes through AI-enhanced underwriting systems. They shorten the process for underwriting, which is critical, Gibson said.

“Our objective in developing these digital farm profiles is to capture the unique assets of each farm and their operations to accelerate the end-to-end insurance solution for growers,” he said. “Finally, by using AI to build a clearer picture of each farm’s risk exposure, including the assets and hazards, we can make decisions smarter and faster.”

Around 500 farms covering more than 4.9 million acres throughout Western Canada have uploaded their data onto Agi3’s platform since it launched three years ago, Bouchard told a reporter following the announcement. Between 80 and 100 of those farms are now buying insurance from Agi3.

In a province like Manitoba where agriculture plays a pivotal economic role, Agi3 demonstrates how AI can enhance resilience, improve efficiency and strengthen the agri-food value chain, said Sean Duckett, senior investment director at Scale AI.

“So across all the provinces where we’re announcing projects this week, one message is clear: AI is no longer theoretical,” Duckett said. “It’s practical, deployable and making real-world impacts today.”

Winnipeg South MP Terry Duguid touted the investment as an example of how Canada is leading the technological AI revolution.

“This is what the new nation-building looks like,” Duguid said. “While railways with steam locomotives have once connected our country and built our economy, today it’s AI and digital systems that will write our next great chapter.”

Meanwhile, a U.S.-based company that provides AI cloud services wants to build a data centre campus south of Winnipeg in Île-des-Chênes.

Las Vegas-based Jet.AI Inc. and Convergence Compute LLC (Jet.AI’s joint venture with Consensus Core Technologies Inc. in Vancouver) announced the selected location on Dec. 4.

The announcement described the proposed campus as “a large-scale development designed to meet rising North American demand for AI,” adding it “is drawing strategic interest from hyperscale tenants.”

In a project update posted on Jet.AI’s website, the company wrote it has secured purchase agreements for a total of approximately 350 acres. It called the area a “Goldilocks” site for data centre development, citing its “unique confluence of abundant hydropower and natural gas capacity.”

In the Dec. 4 announcement, the joint venture noted the land sits adjacent to an electrical substation, a regional natural-gas substation, high-speed fibre routes and the Riel converter station, which supplies 2,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power through the Bipole III line. A 115-kV transmission corridor runs directly overhead, offering near-term access to “scalable and cost-efficient power.”

Winnipeg’s position along major east-west fibre corridors gives the site low-latency reach across Canada and into the United States, the announcement said. These long-haul routes support aggregation of large bandwidth volumes critical for AI and cloud-scale compute operations.

Jet.AI and Consensus Core did not respond to a Tuesday request for comment by the Free Press.

In the companies’ announcement, Jet.AI founder and CEO Mike Winston said as the demand for AI accelerates, “energy-advantaged sites” like the land south of Winnipeg are becoming increasingly difficult to secure.

“The combination of power, redundancy and buildable scale here is extremely hard to replicate,” Winston said.

A spokesperson for the Rural Municipality of Ritchot — where the proposed site is located — wrote in an email to the Free Press nothing has yet come before the RM’s council for consideration.

“Until something is presented, it would be premature for us to provide a comment,” the spokesperson said.

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca