- Gov. Spencer Cox took Utah leaders to one of the world's top AI labs as part of a trade mission to Canada.
- The Utah Legislature plans to put $100 million into a facility where universities and businesses can collaborate on AI.
- Canadian AI experts said they are looking to Utah on its groundbreaking approach to AI regulation.
MONTREAL — Competing at the cutting edge of the world’s most disruptive technology depends, it turns out, on good office space.
Gov. Spencer Cox led a delegation of Utah business leaders and policymakers to one of the premier artificial intelligence research labs in the world on Tuesday to find out why.
The Mila Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute claims to have the largest concentration of AI machine learning academics globally, with 150 professors in partnered universities teaming up with over 140 companies exploring AI applications.
Located just north of Montreal’s Mount Royal, between the bustling markets of Little Italy, Mila boasts a catalog of nearly 2,600 scientific articles on AI since 2018, 734 current research projects and more than 40 successful start-ups over the last three years pioneering AI use in medical research, power grid resilience and product design.
The secret they shared with Utah? Mastering AI’s borderless potential requires bringing research and commercialization into close proximity — the tighter the better.
“We’re very impressed with what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve been able to do, bringing experts together,” Cox told Mila executives on Tuesday. “This is a model for some of the innovation that we want to see happening.”
Utah’s future AI hub
Utah’s own version of Mila is already in the works.
During the state’s 2025 legislative session, lawmakers approved $36.5 million, and recommended another $63.5 million in the 2026 budget, for the construction of “Convergence Hall,” a new state-owned complex at The Point development in Draper, where the old state prison once stood.
Lawmakers envision a state-funded hub where investors, students, professors and government agencies will be housed together to create the largest “innovation campus” in the western United States, featuring access to state resources, a world class library, conference space and over 200 dorms.
The idea rests on Utah’s institutions of higher education — which will each have a dedicated space in the building — targeting their research and student projects around critical problems in local industry, particularly those being faced by the 200+ startups that will be invited to locate their operations on site.
If successful, proponents say, The Point will spur private sector investment in the surrounding area as businesses take advantage of the collection of expertise on emerging technologies in AI, energy and life sciences.
The legislator behind much of Utah’s approach to AI governance, state Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, said Convergence Hall will be more decentralized than the Canadian program, with more business buy-in and less public funding.
“Hopefully this can kind of be the nucleus of efforts going on all over the state,” Cullimore told the Deseret News at Mila. “It can be the epicenter of what’s happening.“
Why did Utah’s trade mission go to Mila?
Despite a packed schedule — featuring meetings with provincial officials, tours at nuclear reactor sites and presentations with top Canadian investors — Cox said he made the Mila visit a priority of his trade mission because of how well positioned Utah businesses are to partner with Mila and replicate the institute’s approach in the Beehive State.
Cox’s delegation, made up of a group of around 30 cabinet members, state lawmakers, business leaders and university administrators, spent the week meeting with government agencies and industry experts in Quebec and Ontario to signal Utah’s desire to forge additional economic ties in the areas of critical minerals and artificial intelligence.
On Monday, Cox met with the Quebec minister of economy, innovation and energy to discuss collaboration around energy and AI. Both Quebec and Utah have plans to double their energy production as demands on the grid grow with the development of AI hubs and data centers.
Quebec minister Christine Fréchette and Ryan Starks, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, signed a letter of intent to establish a framework for closer collaboration in economic development, including AI.
It was “hugely” important for Utah’s entire delegation to visit Mila to understand best practices when it comes to regulating AI and integrating it into businesses, according to Jonathan Freedman, the CEO of World Trade Center Utah, which helped to organize the trade mission.
“The Mila Institute has the most cutting edge innovation and technological minds in the world when it comes to artificial intelligence,” Freedman said.
Freedman believes lasting connections will emerge from the trade mission between Utah companies and Mila, especially where higher education intersects with policy and industry.
If you ask Utah attendees, the return on investment has already begun as they look to follow the example of one groundbreaking Utah-born AI pharmaceutical company.
Utah trade mission already paying off?
A few years ago, Recursion, a biotech company based in Salt Lake City scored an office in Mila.
Company leaders realized that its novel approach to conducting millions of experiments on cells in a lab could revolutionize medical drug discovery if it was paired with AI modeling.
The office next to theirs was occupied by a small AI startup from Montreal called Valence, which had developed a system to predict the effect of medical compounds using digital AI experiments.
It wasn’t long before the occupants of both offices realized it made more sense to set up shop together: Recursion would provide the massive dataset from years of experimentation and Valence would provide the AI deep learning research to shift early experimentation to AI models so that the physical “wet labs” in Salt Lake could focus on the most promising compounds.
“It was obvious that if you were to combine those, the combination would be better than the sum of its parts,” said Sébastien Giguère, co-founder of Valence, in a presentation to the Utah trade mission.
Recursion has now established offices in Montreal, Toronto, New York City and the Bay Area through acquisitions of like-minded AI companies, including Valence, which was acquired in 2023.
Mila’s model of pairing innovative companies, like Recursion, with top researchers in the field, like Valence, set off multiple lightbulbs for Barclay Burns, the chief AI innovation officer at Utah Valley University, and a member of the trade delegation.
In his role, Burns also serves on the Utah Innovation Fund, a program of the Utah Board of Higher Education that will spearhead efforts to commercialize AI research done at Utah universities.
Burns is also working with some of the largest health care providers in the state to develop an AI program to connect families with autistic children to provide mutual support — which, coincidentally, is nearly identical to a project Mila is working on for the Quebec Autism Association.
Immediately following Tuesday’s presentations, Burns and Stéphane Létourneau, the executive vice president at Mila, began discussing ways to begin collaboration on these projects. Burns said he will stay in communication with Létourneau and that he will continue to work with the state Legislature to create a smaller version of Mila in Utah.
If the plans materialize, Burns said he believes a group the delegation met with on Monday, CDPQ, one of the largest investment funds in North America, could be interested in providing support.
“There’s opportunities for them to invest from their fund into a secure, stable set of investments that are also strategic,” Burns said. “It would help the Utah-Canadian connection but then it would also create a much more open pipeline to do other joint ventures.”
Canada looking to Utah on AI safety
Burns wasn’t the only one to connect with Canada’s AI experts on future opportunities.
Bill Brady, the CEO of Troomi, a kid-safe smartphone company aimed at healthy digital habits, also made plans to follow up with Mila experts about a potential collaboration. On Thursday, Brady was also able to consult with legal consultants at Gowling WLG about the possibility of introducing his product to the Canadian market.
Additionally, Paul Campbell, the honorary consul from Utah to Canada, and the owner of several companies, learned how his AI inventory business would fit into Canada’s regulatory environment.
And Scott Larrivee, head of marketing & communications at Nusano, a company that creates radio isotopes for drug manufacturers, gained insight into how his company’s partners could better use their product to develop new therapeutics.
But there were some areas where the delegation’s Canadian counterparts were looking to Utah for advice.
The Beehive State has led the nation on AI policy, becoming the first state in 2024 to pass legislation clarifying that companies will be held liable if their use of AI violates consumer protection laws.
The bill was paired with another first-in-the-nation policy creating the Office of Artificial Intelligence whose AI policy lab works with industry stakeholders to explore potential guardrails while also providing certain legal leeway for companies that have a novel AI product they hope to test.
In 2025, the Legislature updated AI consumer protection code to require that companies disclose if they are using an AI-powered chat bot in high stakes situations, like those regarding personal finances, or in regulated industries, like mental health treatments.
The AI policy experts at Mila were already aware of these bills, according to the their sponsor, Sen. Cullimore, and were taking note of Utah’s approach to AI governance.
“It was really interesting to hear that a lot of the same things they’re discussing is what we’ve already discussed, and we’ve found a way to implement it, and they were pretty intrigued,” Cullimore said. “They actually praised Utah for being on the forefront of this.”