Ontario Needs to Buy Local AI to Lead

Ontario faces acute public-service pressures and is failing to act as a customer for homegrown AI, argues Liam Gill, lead of the Capital Program at MaRS Discovery District. The piece frames a simple tradeoff: you can increase physical capacity or improve efficiency; AI offers the latter, potentially reducing wait times by 25 percent in emergency departments without building dozens of new facilities. "Ontario has the talent, the companies, and the need. What it does not yet have is a procurement system capable of bringing those pieces together," said Liam Gill.

The practical barrier is procurement, not research. Ontario startups report a requirement to validate solutions outside the province before public buyers will adopt them. This raises time-to-market and shifts initial deployments to other jurisdictions. International examples cited include Vienna using AI for housing affordability and Sweden using automated matching to reduce unemployment, showing how operational pilots can drive measurable outcomes. In health care, local firms have built specialized AI agents to cut clinician administrative load, but adoption stalls on procurement risk tolerance, compliance proofing, and pilot funding.

The argument sits at the intersection of innovation policy and product-market fit. Government procurement is a multiplier: when public buyers accept risk and buy early, startups gain scale, data access, and iteration cycles that accelerate product maturity. Without provincial demand, Ontario exports human capital and loses downstream value capture such as recurring contracts and data governance advantages. For practitioners this matters because where public-sector customers lead, product requirements, standards, and datasets follow, shaping national AI stacks and competitive advantage.

Track provincial procurement pilots, sandbox policy changes, and targeted budget lines that treat government as an early adopter. If Ontario revises procurement gates to enable controlled pilots and outcome-based contracts, local startups will have a clearer path from proof-of-concept to scale inside the province.