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All issues Issue 11 · August 27 2026

Making Sense.

AI, translated for Canadian business leaders.

Editor's Note

We have a lighter issue this week, with a focus on sharing three recent examples of homegrown Canadian companies finding success. The AI wave has meant not only are established organizations transforming themselves, but opportunities have emerged for brand new companies and products to build from the technological advances. Alongside that, we have the latest news coming out of the leading AI labs, including Anthropic's progress to meet legislation for "watermarked" outputs.

Enjoy the stories, and we'll see you again next month.

– Chris AwramEditor-in-Chief

In this issue
  1. 01
    Three stories from the past two weeks.
    A Kelowna startup maps wildfire escape routes with AI, Toronto's Kepler Communications brings the first commercial data relay online in orbit, and a Canadian startup's AI helps airlines recover faster from flight disruptions.
  2. 02
    Release Radar.
    Gemini 3.7 Flash lands at half the price of the previous model, Anthropic begins watermarking Claude's text, OpenAI ships enterprise admin controls, and OpenAI's own Jalapeño inference chip posts its first benchmarks against Nvidia.
  3. 03
    Four numbers for your next meeting.
    Asana's two-week Codex rebuild, Thomson Reuters training its own model for $40 million, the Ramp index on Opus 5's slow start, and Anthropic's revenue run rate.
01 — In The News

Three stories from the past two weeks.

A Kelowna startup maps wildfire escape routes with AI, Toronto's Kepler Communications brings the first commercial data relay online in orbit, and a Montréal startup's AI helps Air Transat recover faster from flight disruptions.

01

A Kelowna startup is using AI to map your way out of a wildfire.

An intense nighttime forest wildfire burning through trees

BC wildfires often force evacuees down service roads and backroads where conditions are unpredictable and drivers are unprepared. Kelowna-based IntelliMass built BackRoadIntel as a solution. The crowdsourced mapping platform combines kinetic sensors, dashcam data, and driver narration to catalogue back-road conditions that aren't captured on any other map service. The platform is currently used by emergency and local officials, and the company aims to launch a public-facing map feature later this year. It is piloting the approach with First Nations near Lytton, a village that faced a devastating wildfire in 2021, where a quarter of local Indigenous bands rely on a single road to get out during a wildfire.

Read more →
02

A Canadian company brings a first-of-its-kind data network online in orbit.

A radio telescope dish under a bright starry night sky

Toronto's Kepler Communications has brought the first commercial optical-relay satellite network of its kind online, delivering real-time computing in orbit. CEO and co-founder Mina Mitry remarked, "We're proud to be the first to make it a commercial reality," as Kepler's success comes ahead of similar efforts from Amazon and Starlink. The system is a network of satellites that process and analyze data directly in space, reducing latency, enabling the use of AI, and supporting autonomous space operations. With demand for computing power growing, companies are looking to launch their own orbital data centres, and Kepler plans to expand its network in 2028.

Read more →
03

Air Transat partners with a Montréal AI startup to fight flight disruptions.

The silhouette of a traveller in an airport terminal

Montréal startup StratosX's X360 platform identifies where disruption is happening in air travel operations and proactively suggests the quickest path to recovery. It pairs predictive modelling with generative AI and the airline's own operations data to recommend the best way to reroute planes and rebook travellers when weather, strikes, or geopolitics disrupt operations. StratosX estimates that flight disruptions are a roughly $60-billion-a-year problem for airlines worldwide. The startup is partnering with Air Transat to deploy the platform to manage its aircraft, crew, and passengers. This partnership fits the pattern we've been seeing of Canadian organizations collaborating on innovation within their sectors.

Read more →
02 — Release Radar

Recent launches.

  • • Google releases Gemini 3.7 Flash, a fast, low-cost model built for everyday high-volume work. It's priced at $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens, half of what Gemini 3.6 Flash cost just three weeks earlier.
  • • Anthropic begins watermarking Claude's text worldwide, embedding an invisible statistical mark to comply with the EU AI Act, which requires AI providers to label machine-generated content so it can be identified as AI-made.
  • • OpenAI ships an Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex, giving IT and compliance teams more oversight of how AI is used across an organization.
  • • OpenAI posts first benchmarks for Jalapeño, its own Broadcom-built inference chip, claiming 1.5 to 1.9x more AI work per watt than Nvidia's best, with a small-volume rollout late 2026.
03 — Quick Facts

Four numbers for your next meeting.

  • • Asana used OpenAI's Codex to rebuild an outdated testing system in about two weeks, work it had scoped at five years, for roughly $12K in compute. OpenAI
  • • Thomson Reuters spent about US$40 million to train its own AI model, a fraction of frontier-lab budgets. The Logic
  • • Ramp's AI index shows Opus 5 was just 3.5% of Anthropic model spend in July, while the cheaper Opus 4.8 led at 28%: cost drives adoption. FT
  • • Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $65 billion in July, up from $47 billion in May, with 6,000 customers now spending $100,000 or more a year. Simon Willison