‘Ontario has 1,600 AI firms that’s grasping for graduates’: Canadian minister Victor Anthony Fedeli

India Today AI Summit: Toronto in Canada’s Ontario province is widely considered as the birthplace of artificial intelligence (AI), said Victor Anthony Fedeli, Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. He said there are thousands of firms in the province that are hungry to onboard AI graduates. 

Speaking at the India Today AI Summit, Fedeli said, “Toronto in Ontario is widely considered the birthplace of AI. Dr Geoffrey Hinton who was awarded the Nobel Prize for machine learning began working on machine learning and AI decades ago.” 

He said once they saw the power of AI, they started the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence that currently employs 800 researchers. “We continue to put out students every year. We graduated about 1,100 AI masters, this year we had about 1,700 AI masters in a row. We saw about 17,000 new AI employees just about last year. So, it’s still a field that’s growing greatly in Toronto,” he said.

“In Ontario we have about 1,600 AI firms all grasping for these graduates. To put it in perspective, Ontario is the largest province in Canada but still has only 15 million people. But we graduate 86,000 STEM grads every single year,” said Fedeli. 

Ontario just added $750 million in their budget permanently now to graduate a further 20,500 annually, he said. 

“So, in a small country like Canada with 35 or so million people, we in Ontario will be graduating over 100,000 STEM grads every year so that we have a steady stream of these graduates. If companies are looking for them and find them in India, you can always find them in Ontario,” he quipped. 

The remarks come at a time when India AI Impact Summit 2026 is underway at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. The event is expected to draw delegates from more than 30 countries, including ministers, senior officials, foreign representatives and members of international organisations.

Watch the conversation here: