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How BC’s Grassroots AI Ecosystem Delivers on the Province’s 10-Year Vision

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British Columbia just dropped Look West a 10-year bet on major projects, skilled workers, and strategic sectors like AI and quantum.

Cool. Now here’s the missing piece:

You don’t get a resilient AI economy just by funding big projects.

You get it by powering up the community layer: the humans, networks, and local infrastructures that actually make this tech land well.

Look West Report (PDF)

The BC + AI Ecosystem is already doing this work. This memo maps Look West’s goals to community-driven pathways that can turn this strategy from industrial plan into living system.

1. What Look West Wants (AI Edition)

From the AI / innovation side, Look West is basically saying:

• Double the AI & quantum sector and grow tech’s economic value and jobs over the next decade.
• Integrate AI into K–12 via a new provincial advisory committee and early skills exposure.
• Upskill and reskill workers as trades, construction, manufacturing, and clean energy all get automated and instrumented.
• Help SMEs adopt advanced tech, so it’s not just the usual suspects capturing all the gains.
• Align with national security, critical minerals, ports, and clean energy while keeping public trust and social license intact.

All good ambitions. But none of that sticks without trust, real local legitimacy, AI literacy that’s actually grounded in the cultures and communities it touches, and meaningful participation from people on the ground. That’s where the existing network comes in.

2. What Already Exists: BC’s Community AI Backbone

Over the last 18+ months, BC’s grassroots AI ecosystem has quietly built out:

• A province-wide network of practitioners
  • Meetups, hackathons, and subgroups connecting founders, students, artists, educators, public servants, and Indigenous leaders.
  • “AI in the wild” use cases across media, health, creative industries, trades, public interest tech.
• Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI) framing for AI
  • Groundwork around who benefits, who gets excluded, who gets harmed.
  • Early thinking on data governance, Indigenous sovereignty, and community consent.
• Thematic working groups already aligned to Look West
  • AI + Education (K–12 & post-secondary transformation)
  • AI + Creative Industries (film, VFX, games, music, design)
  • Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC) (ethics, philosophy, mental health, human impacts)
  • Regional and sector clusters (Surrey AI, health & life sciences links, climate / Indigenomics work, etc.)
• A Professional AI Industry Association
  • Built deliberately as a community-first counterpart to legacy gatekeeping networks.
  • Designed to represent SMEs, independents, educators, and community orgs, not just large enterprises.