Q. What is the Arctic Foundation?

Colum Elliott-Kelly, CEO, Arctic AI: The Foundation is something we’ve wanted to set up for a couple of years now. It’s really a vehicle for multiple initiatives that we’ve undertaken since around the start of the pandemic, including working with charities, volunteering, DEI, and other initiatives.

Q. Tell us a bit about working for charity clients…

As much as we can, we try to provide discounted services and free platform licenses to clients in the charitable sector. To be honest, it’s more about doing what we can to reduce our fees for them - but the launch of the Foundation is all about being more systematic and strategic about this. In a few weeks, we are super excited to be re-launching one of these partnerships, in Toronto, to make it more of a Foundation initiative than a client relationship. Hopefully, that’ll be compelling enough to attract some more clients from the non-profit space.

Q. Why is it important to work with charities and NGOs?

It’s important to our whole team because just as we are super passionate about making AI actually work for the economy and for businesses, we are just as passionate about making it work for humanity. The Foundation is our small effort to make that happen. If we can help a charity target their fundraising outreach, or speed up their crisis-triage process, then we’d like to do that as non-commercially as possible - the math and technology for those case studies is just the same as what we have done for marketing departments, maintenance teams, private equity firms and so on. Essentially, our vision is a world where AI actually works for the world. We don’t feel we can fully pursue that vision without the Foundation.

Q. What kind of services will you be offering clients of the Foundation?

For now, we'll focus on discounted services rates, free platform license, and seconded employees.

Q. What else will the Foundation do?

The Foundation will be the forum for our internal initiatives, in particular the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion work that we have always taken very seriously. Each month, we have a rotating Chair of our internal DEI committee, who organizes an event, a fundraising drive, a speaker series, or some other initiative that fulfils our quarterly goals. Again, a small dent that we are trying to be a little more systematic about! The Foundation creates a dedicated team and outlet for internal projects, and we want to see it grow and hopefully begin to bring "genuine value" to the world around us.

Q. Can you give some examples of the Foundation's "internal" projects at Arctic AI?

For sure. Early in 2023, we'll be kicking off a project to help to get under-represented minorities into the AI industry. This problem starts ahead of college or university, so we will be deploying our time and our technology to reach out to under-represented communities in high-school age groups, to help demystify the industry, offer work placements, set up mentorship and career advice relationships, and eventually (we hope) create a pathway to improve representation in our industry. Another near-term example is that the Foundation will pick up the work on Women In Technology that our VP Jess set up while we were part of Filament AI, and launch multiple WIT speaker series, mentorship schemes, and other initiatives.